PPP official accused of beating up education officer

Education officer claims dozen men barged into his office and tortured him for refusing to sign list of appointments.

KARACHI:

A day after the local bodies minister was accused of torturing his secretary, an official of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) was accused of beating up an education department official.

Mumtaz Shaikh, a district elementary education officer, claimed that more than a dozen men barged into his office on Tuesday, locked the door from the inside and tortured him for refusing to sign a list of appointments. He named PPP’s district central president Syed Sohail Abidi and his men. According to Shaikh, a man came to his office on Abidi’s reference and asked him to issue a joining letter. Since Shaikh had already exceeded the limit, he refused to sign the letter. At this, the man dialled Abidi’s phone and asked Shaikh to have a word with him.

“I told Abidi that I have already issued four joining letters to his men and cannot do this anymore,” Shaikh told The Express Tribune.

After some time, Abidi arrived at the office in Karimabad along with eight other PPP workers and, Shaikh claimed, that he beat him up. “I called the police emergency helpline 15 but to no avail,” he said.

Shaikh said he will consult his boss, education secretary Fazlullah Pechuho, before registering an FIR. He claimed that around 800 job offer letters were already issued by the former director schools for Karachi, Ataullah Bhutto. “We can’t give any more joining letters. Even if we did, we won’t be able to pay any salaries.”

For his part, Ataullah Bhutto insisted that he only issued letters based on the department’s capacity. He accused his replacement, Qasim Baloch, of issuing 1,000 more appointment letters without proper verification. “Hundreds of these letters carried my forged signatures,” he added.

Meanwhile, Abidi denied beating up Shaikh. He said that the man with the letter called him when the guard refused to let him enter the office. “I told Shaikh that if this man has a job offer letter, then it must have been issued on merit so there is no reason why you should not give him a joining letter.”

When Shaikh replied that he doesn’t have time, it angered Abidi, who decided to pay him a visit. “A lot of people were already gathered at the office,” he told The Express Tribune. “I only shouted at Shaikh for treating me like a beggar and not a public representative.”

He claimed that the other disgruntled people were complaining that they had been visiting from Dadu for the past week but have yet to be issued joining letters. Those people beat Shaikh up, he said. He accused the education department of issuing hundreds of job offers in the past and the people demanding money are one of those.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2013.