ISLAMABAD - In an apparent move of Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan to harass ‘defiant’ Chairman NADRA Tariq Malik, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has summoned him on charges of concealing information at the time of getting his passport issued in 2010.
A source in FIA said that Inspector Azmat Khan of anti-corruption circle of the agency had issued a notice to chairman National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to appear before him on December 31 in connection with a probe. However, Tariq Malik did not appear before the investigator owing to his scheduled meeting in the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on e-voting system and would shortly spear before the FIA, an official of the NADRA confirmed.
In the notice, FIA has alleged that Tariq Malik concealed the information about his official position in NADRA in 2010 when he got issued a new passport in his name. The data of passports directorate showed that Malik had shown himself as IT professional at the time of getting the new passport.
However, the NADRA official said that chairman NADRA was a contractual employee of the authority at that time and there was no need to show his official position in the passports record. The chairman had a separate official passport that he got after becoming the head of the authority, he said.
The sources in FIA said that Jalil Khan, deputy director and head of the anti-corruption circle of FIA’s Islamabad zone, had already sought a number of documents from chairman NADRA including the NOCs that he got prior to his official foreign visits. The FIA is doing all this to pressurise chairman NADRA so that he could withdraw from his stand that he took before the interior ministry bosses, the sources added.