KARACHI: The closed-circuit television camera footage of the recent kidnapping of Advocate Awais Ali Shah also shows a car with Sindh police registration number plates moving close to the victim’s car. Investigators say they believe he was whisked off in that car. Of course, no one at the time thought much of it because of the police plates.

There are several shops around Karachi’s Plaza motor parts market and other such areas which make name plates and number plates. You can get anything made there. Almost all these shops have the dark-green ‘Government of Pakistan’ number plates, police licence plates for motorbikes, AFR (applied for registration) plates and one even had a dark-blue Pakistan Navy plate with others seen on military vehicles.

“Of course, we ask the people who come here to get any kind of plates made for documentation before taking orders from them,” one shopkeeper, Mohammad Qasim, tells Dawn.

There were also some licence plates which looked like the genuine yellow Sindh licence plates. “Well, people come to us if their original licence plates fell off or were stolen,” the shopkeeper says.

There are cheap and expensive name plates for homes, etc. These are made of metal as well as plastic and may be as inexpensive as Rs150 to as expensive as over Rs20,000. Still, the most plates being prepared by these people with the expertise to do so are the car and motorcycle licence plates.

Speaking to Dawn, Additional DIG-Traffic Tahir Ahmed Noorani said that these people had initially been making rubber stamps but now they are also into the name plate and licence plate-making business, which is illegal. “When you can also buy complete police and armed forces uniforms here with regulation boots and badges, what’s so strange about the availability of fake licence plates?” he says.

“It is all happening all around us and no one seems to care. They seem to be suffering from the ostrich syndrome,” he adds. “Why else won’t they put an end to it?”

“There are vendors encroaching footpaths; there is charged parking going on despite it all being illegal but the police won’t do anything about those menaces. They should arrest them all,” the DIG says.

“In case of theft or a missing plate, AFR licence plates or other temporary plates are issued by the excise and taxation department to help you during the duplication procedure, which may take up to 10 or 15 days. That also only happens after you file an FIR with the police and take it to them. These shops making number plates have no business making such plates.”

Citizens-Police Liaison Committee chief Zubair Habib also has similar views. “We were just discussing this with the home minister,” he says. “It is the height of indiscipline. If you can’t enforce law, this is what happens. The government has to really crack down on these people.”

But he also thought it a problem that the excise and taxation department here is unable to issue licence plates or their duplicates in time. “See, making licence plates is no rocket science. They can be made quickly so that people won’t have to opt for these fake plates. Then the ones issued by the government should also carry such features which can’t be duplicated easily,” he concludes.

Efforts made by Dawn to speak to officials in the excise and taxation department went in vain.

Published in Dawn, June 26th, 2016