Land grabbing: FIA plans arrests of officials involved in ‘china-cutting’

Five-member team working under deputy director Altaf Hussain is probing these allegations

KARACHI: In the aftermath of the collection of data on ‘china-cutting’ from Civic Centre, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) is preparing to arrest the officials involved.

In the second phase of their drive against land grabbing, the FIA is determined to uncover all corruption, particularly in the land department.

An FIA official said that some government officials, particularly those working in the land department of the KMC and the defunct KDA, are likely to be arrested soon on the basis of the record relating to land encroachment and the ‘china-cutting’. “There are hundreds of files and we are still busy in scrutinising them,” he said. “So far we have found the involvement of a few officials and they will be arrested soon for their involvement in China-cutting, particularly in the outskirts of the city and the city’s posh areas.”



The officer added that the names of top officials are also among those were involved in this corruption at the behest of political parties. “We cannot arrest them without concrete evidence therefore we are gathering evidences against them in the first phase,” he explained.

A five-member FIA team working under deputy director Altaf Hussain is probing allegations of china-cutting. Hussain told The Express Tribune that the investigations are in the preliminary levels. “We cannot share anything with the media as we are still busy scrutinising the records that we collected from the land department,” he said.

FIA officials along with the Rangers troops had conducted a raid on Friday night on the land department offices of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) and the defunct Karachi Development Authority. These offices are located on the fourth and 10th floor of Civic Centre. The FIA and Rangers seized hundreds of important documents pertaining to china-cutting. The files were so many that they had to arrange for a truck to carry them to the FIA offices.

The raid was conducted apparently on information provided by the land department officials already in FIA custody. Several records and documents of societies formed via ‘china-cutting’ were taken into custody. According to officials privy to the development, the seized files belonged to those cases that belonged to the time when Manzur Qadir was the director-general of the Sindh Building Control Authority (SBCA).

This was the second raid at Civic Centre. Earlier, the Rangers had carried out a raid at the building on June 16, when they visited the SBCA offices and confiscated data in addition to taking photographs of documents.

The Rangers spokesperson clarified, however, that they did not raid the land department offices. “The raid was conducted by the FIA and we [Rangers] were providing them security cover,” he said. “The records seized from the land department are also in FIA’s custody.”

The provincial government was aware of the raid and had consented to it, claimed an official privy to the matter. Commissioner Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, who also holds the additional charge of KMC administrator, also added that it was not a raid. “They [FIA officials] approached us and told us that they needed access to some documents for investigation,” said Siddiqui, adding that they were given permission to seize the records.

“They are all government documents and we have obviously kept a record of all that we gave them,” he told The Express Tribune. Siddiqui further said that he has requested all the departments and agencies to approach the government if they have similar requests in the future.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 27^th, 2015.