LAHORE: The Punjab chapter of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has arrested four government servants, two of the ‘most-wanted’ human traffickers and three other proclaimed offenders, Director FIA Punjab Zafar Ahmad Qureshi told reporters on Thursday.
Qureshi said that FIA Gujrat arrested a notorious human trafficker named Tahir Subhani and two of his guards.
Subhani is said to be an active member of the human trafficking network run by Mehmood and Hafiz Shabbir (his name was placed in FIA’s ‘Red Book’, which contains details of the “most-wanted” human traffickers).
He said that Tahir Subhani was wanted in six different cases involving human trafficking. He said that the accused had confessed that two of the five people he tried to smuggle from Iran to Greece via Turkey had been shot dead.
The FIA official said that they had contacted the Foreign Office to bring the bodies of the deceased men back to Pakistan.
He said that the FIA had also arrested three proclaimed offenders, including Hafiz Ghulam Akbar, Rashid Ahmed, Abdul Majeed and Asghar Gajuji. He said that the ‘Red Book’ also contained Asghar’s name.
Highlighting his agency’s crackdown against people involved in corruption and human trafficking, he said that those detainees included four officials of the National Highway Authority, tehsildar Haroon Rasheed Durrani, patwaris Rafiqur Ahmed and Ghulam Mustafa. He said that these government servants had demanded Rs893,000 from 21 people whose land had been acquired by the government for the construction of a Motorway near Mouza Gulzarpur and Mouza Sher Singh.
Similarly, FIA Multan caught an assistant lineman “red -handed” while he was accepting a bribe of Rs10,000 for reinstalling the connection of a cold storage unit. The arrested worker’s immediate supervisor, the SDO, managed to escape.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 24th, 2010.
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