LAHORE – FIA investigators are reluctant to take action against their colleague ‘Assistant’ Maqsood, who introduced himself as an inspector to mint over Rs. 0.5 million from an innocent citizen after keeping him in illegal custody, documents available with TheNation revealed.
Although an FIR was registered against Maqsood four years after the incident, in the meanwhile he got two FIRs registered against the applicant just to pressurise him into not pursuing the case. Muhammad Ramzan, the applicant, shared these details with this scribe outside the FIA Lahore office. Despite the fact that an FIR was finally registered against him on January 5, 2012, Maqsood is still not only roaming freely in FIA offices but also performing his duties in FIA Gujranwala Circle. As per the FIR, Maqsood, who was performing duties as an assistant in FIA Gujrat, impersonated as Inspector Rai Abdur Razzaq and arrested Ramzan from Islamabad Airport on May 10, 2008, while he was there to see off his relatives for Romania, on fake charges of being involved in human trafficking. Ramzan alleged that Maqsood was accompanied by three private people, later identified as Baqir Hussain, Muhammad Irfan and Mirza Riaz. “They forcibly brought me to Gujrat and demanded Rs. 2m for my release, but later they released me after receiving Rs. 0.5 million,” he said.
Ramzan further said that he had brought the matter to the attention of the FIA Gujrat office, and requested them to take action against Maqsood for keeping him in illegal custody and minting Rs. 0.5 million from him. After repeated visits to FIA Gujrat, Gujranwala and Lahore offices for four years, I finally succeeded in getting an FIR registered against Maqsood on January 05, 2012, informed Ramzan.
“But despite the passage of more than five months since the registration of the FIR against the accused, he is still performing his duties and so far no officer of the FIA has even tried to arrest him,” Ramzan lamented.
An FIA officer, Gul Sanober, even sent a requisition to the FIA Headquarters asking the management to post Maqsood at the FIA Gujranwala office since he was a very competent officer. Ramzan said that Maqsood got the inquiry against him changed around 50 times and had also committed such frauds with other people. When FIA Assistant Director Jamil Khan, the concerned inquiry officer, was contacted and asked why he had not arrested Maqsood so far, he said that the accused got pre-arrest bail from the court a couple of days ago.