Hyderabad
Inspector General of Police Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Dr Sanaullah Abbasi Thursday said the reforms which introduced in the Police were bringing positive changes in maintaining the rules of law.
He said special focus was being given to improve quality of investigations, information and digitalization in the tribal districts, beside forensic facilities adding that for the first time, historic steps were taken to ensure rights of women, children and minorities.
He stated this while giving an online lecture on “Police reforms in Pakistan” to the students of Pakistan Study Centre University of Sindh Jamshoro.
The Vice Chancellor University of Sindh Prof. Dr. Muhammad Siddique Kalhoro chaired the webinar while the Director, Pakistan Study Centre Dr. Shuja Ahmed Mahesar and large number of faculty members, scholars and students attended the event.
Dr Sanaullah Abbasi said that the areas had been wiped out of terrorists to a large extent and at the moment, drug menace and smuggling was a big challenge. He vowed to clear society of all anti-social elements with the cooperation of local people.
He informed that steps were being taken to promote local tourism keeping in view the natural beauty of the merged districts.
The IGP said while around 29,000 Levies and Khassadar personnel had been merged into the regular Police force after the merger of the FATA districts into KP, they were being trained before they took up their responsibilities in the force.
He said merit based policy was being pursued in the recruitment process and criteria for recruitment of women in police force in tribal districts had been relaxed, adding only local women would be recruited in their allotted seats.
Dr Abbasi said that basic rights of the local people were restored after completion of the merger process in the province.
He informed that a major challenge which he faced after merger of FATA districts was construction of the Police infrastructure in the tribal districts as well as training of the ex-Khassadar and Levies men.
“For the first time, we have authorized the Station House Officers (SHOs) as the drawing and disbursing officers (DDOs) so that they can better manage expenditures of their respective police stations. This will alleviate the chances of corrupt practices in the force,” he informed.
The IGP said an officer of SP level used to be a DDO in the past but he said he had decentralized the DDO powers to the level of SHOs.
“The major challenges are terrorism, street crimes, narcotics and the merger process of the tribal police,” he said, adding that he believed that terrorism incidents and street crimes had been controlled to a great extent.
“At present we are working more on narcotics elimination and the merger and training of the tribal cops,” he added.
Sharing the data, he informed that since beginning of year 2020, the KP police had seized 11081kg charas, 920kg opium, 557kg heroin, 851kg ice and 2107 liters liquor.
Similarly, he said, terrorism incidents had witnessed a decline since the counter-terrorism department (CTD) arrested 344 terrorists from various regions of the province during the current year so far.
Dr Abbasi said that the police had also seized smuggling goods worth Rs. 420.92 million in the province since the start of 2020.
He said smuggled items worth Rs.141 million were seized in Peshawar, items worth Rs.151 million in Mardan, Rs.85 million of smuggle goods in Kohat, Rs.40 million worth of items in Bannu and Rs 0.14 million worth of smuggled items were seized in Malakand region.
“The FATA used to have heroin factories and drugs and this is the reason that drugs used to be smuggled from there to KP and other parts of the country”, he said and added, with merger into KP now the war against drugs had started and hopefully the drug smuggling and its abuse had started to be on a decline now.—APP
