For capital police, to retrieve stolen cars from AJK is very difficult

Officials decry insufficient staff and complicated process to go to other provinces as citizens seek better security

ISLAMABAD: Car theft is a universal phenomenon and the federal capital is not immune to petty crime. Apart from the poorly staffed police department tasked to stop theft and retrieve stolen cars, the location of the city at the confluence of three provinces and territories makes the task all the more difficult if not impossible.

Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) — one of the suspected destination for cars stolen in Islamabad — can even be a wholly different country when attempting to retrieve stolen property from.there

According to the Islamabad Police’s Anti Car Lifting Cell (ACLC), some 225 vehicles were stolen from the federal capital last year while five cars have been reported as stolen during the first 20 days of the ongoing year.

Some of these stolen cars were suspected to have been spirited away into the mountainous valleys of AJK. Some others are suspected to be driven into neighbouring Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), out of the reach of the Islamabad Police.



An official in the Islamabad Police claimed that the ACLC has limited staff which hinders their ability to effectively stop car theft or to investigate and solve cases.

Indeed, according to data available with Daily Express, of the 67 sanctioned posts in the federal capital’s ACLC, 23 posts are currently empty.

The cell needs at least one inspector, two sub-inspectors, an assistant sub-inspector, a head constable and 18 constables.

Further, the capital is a haven for car thieves since there are a large number of expensive cars easily available while the access to AJK and K-P is very easy. This makes stealing cars from the federal capital a low-risk and highly-rewarding proposition.

Another issue, officials claimed, was that the police in AJK allegedly do not readily cooperate with their counterparts from Islamabad to arrest suspects or to recover stolen vehicles.

A well-placed police source disclosed they have to go through a complex series of processes if it intends to go to either neighbouring province of K-P or Punjab to arrest a suspect or to recover a stolen car.

“First, we need to obtain [arrest or search] warrants from the local magistrate. Then, we have to file an application with Islamabad’s chief commissioner,” the official explained.

Based on the application, the chief commissioner contacts the chief secretary of the province (in case of K-P or Punjab) where the suspect is allegedly hiding or taking refuge.

The provincial secretary then asks for a report from all the police officials of their districts regarding the suspect.  “This process is very lengthy and consumes a lot of precious time,” the official said.

If the suspect flees to AJK, the police officers complained that the police there allegedly create difficulties instead of providing assistance.

Former Islamabad Police Operations senior superintendent of Police Sajid Kiani, who was transferred from the federal capital around a year ago, had exposed the extent of AJK turning into a haven for stolen cars from the capital after a large number of such cars were recovered from the Himalayan territory last year and returned to their owners as a result of his personal efforts.

Islamabad Police ACLC In-charge Inspector Aslam Kalyar said that despite the shortage of manpower, the cell was working to its maximum to curtail incidents of car theft.

Asked about the five vehicles stolen from different parts of the federal capital during the first 20 days of 2019, he said that they have set up two teams to investigate the cases and these teams have already been dispatched to different provinces to search for the suspected car thieves and the stolen vehicles.

Moreover, he said that they had started setting up pop-up pickets for snap checking to put an end to such incidents.

Kalyar added that in 2018, the Islamabad ACLC had arrested 147 people who were allegedly part of some 23 car theft gangs and recovered some 105 stolen cars from their possession.

He added that of the cars recovered, around 179 vehicles were still at the ACLC office which will be returned to their rightful owners after completing all legal procedures.



The citizens of the federal capital, though, remain uneasy. They claim that incidents of car theft have increased exponentially over the last four to five months since the new Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) government took over.

They claimed that around 10 cars have been stolen from a small housing society of Rawal Town. Instead of tracking the suspects and recovering the cars, locals claimed that the police had instead asked them to set up barriers and to hire private security guards to safeguard their vehicles.

Rawal Town Union Council Chairman Zaheer Shah told Daily Express that even his repeated pleas to the police to increase patrolling and to take measures to arrest car thieves fell on deaf years.

Shah said that the residents of Rawal Town decided to pool their resources to set up barriers at the entry and exit points of the town and hired security guards. From the day they put up the barriers and deployed security guards, Shah said, the incidents of car theft stopped.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th, 2019.