ISLAMABAD: After five years, the Rawalpindi district administration is again out demarcating the vast tracts of forest land on the outskirts of the garrison city that a big real estate developer acquired, allegedly unlawfully, 14 years ago.

Dawn has learnt that the district administration has reassigned the task to the same three tehsildars (land revenue officers) who were given the assignment the first time in 2009 when the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of the allegations, and the litigations they gave rise to, and ordered the demarcation.

An annoyed Supreme Court summoned the District Coordination Officer of Rawalpindi recently to explain the inordinate delay.

That pushed the administration once again to go through the motions of demarcating the 684 acres the Bahria Town allegedly encroached upon in Rakh Takht Pari and another 732.5 acres in Loi Bher forested areas in 2005.

Since then, the issue of legal ownership of the land has been hanging fire in courts and become too complicated as part of the land the Bahria Town subsequently sold to the Defence Housing Authority (DHA) and to individuals.

Buyers, which included retired military officers, have raised commercial and residential buildings worth billions of rupees on the land they say they purchased lawfully, complicating a legal settlement.

Sixty-one civil and criminal cases are pending in various courts against the property tycoon Malik Riaz alone.

In the forestland case, his Bahria Town enterprise obtained a restraining order from a civil court against the demarcation process as Rawalpindi Revenue Board authorities allegedly dithered action.

There exists a feeling in the legal and political circles that the PML-N government in Punjab pursued the cases against Malik Riaz seriously when PPP coalition was ruling the country. But its vigour waned after the PML-N swept the 2013 general elections and came to power at the Centre too.

Punjab government’s additional prosecutor general Tariq Mustafa, however, insists the delay in prosecuting the cases was not deliberate. “It is the discretion of the courts to take them (the cases) up at regular intervals,” he told Dawn.

Though the Rawalpindi bench of the Lahore High Court (LHC) had declared illegal the merger of the Revenue Employees Cooperative Housing Society (RECHS) with the Bahria Town in June 2012, the judgment remains unimplemented due to legal complexities and the affected society members without relief.

Bahria Town lawyers have denied land-grabbing charges in courts, saying their client conformed to the law in developing the land and offered compensation if the interest of any RECHS members was hurt.

But in 2012, additional advocate general of the Punjab government Razzaq Mirza rejected the offer, saying forests are protected areas under the law and their land could not be sold or leased for housing purposes.

A revenue officer engaged in demarcation, speaking on the condition of anonymity, however, warned that demarcation of the forestland “at this stage when the Bahria Town has already sold the disputed land” would create further legal complexities.

“No one, neither the government nor the judiciary, had warned potential buyers of any encroachment. They purchased the land in a lawful manner and have raised buildings on them since,” he said.

A senior manager of the Bahria Town, Colonel (retired) Khalil, claimed to Dawn that the land in question was “undisputed and belongs to the Bahria Town

“Demarcating the land by government officials is tantamount to contempt of court,” he added, recalling the restraining order issued by a civil judge of Rawalpindi last year.