Police looking for man who made fake call about crashed plane

Rescue officials claim responding to the call caused damage to their fire tenders

RAWALPINDI: Kallar Syedan police are looking for a man who had called Rescue 1122 on Wednesday evening and falsely claimed that a plane had crashed in the area.

Rescue workers responding to the call had to fire a large bush fire but did not find any wreckage.

At around 8pm on the evening of March 22, a man identifying himself as Raja Muhammad Ismail Zaman had called the rescue service alerting them that an aircraft had crashed. Rescue officials had subsequently dispatched firefighting vehicles from stations in Kallar Syedan, Gujjar Khan, and Rawalpindi.

However, when they reached the spot in Mera Singahal, they found a large fire raging. While rescuers extinguished the fire after battling it for a while, they found no trace of the plane.

Subsequently, the rescue department through its Kallar Syedan station coordinator Haris Farooq, lodged a complaint with the with the police against the caller.

According to the complainant, the rescue worker said that their fire tenders had to cross difficult terrain to reach the spot indicated by the caller. However, they only found a large bush fire at the spot.

Farooq contended that the efforts of the rescuers had cost a lot of money to the state while their vehicles also suffered damage as a result of the fake call.

The Kallar Syedan police lodged an FIR under section 25-D of telegraphic action (providing false information) and section 427 of Pakistan Penal code (committing mischief causing damage to public property).

SI Raja Ghulam Shabbir, the investigation officer in the case, told The Express Tribune that they were still searching for suspects and that no arrests had been made in the case so far.

However, he was confident that police would arrest the suspect soon.

Meanwhile, an official at Rescue 1122 said that the fake call had caused loss to the department since tenders from three stations along with a large number firefighters had to be dispatched while responding to the call. He added that calls about planes crashing were taken seriously.

Describing the call which they had received, the rescue official said that the caller identified himself and said claimed that he was an eyewitness to the crash.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 26^th, 2017.