KARACHI: A model court has asked the Karachi police chief to hold a departmental inquiry against the officer in charge of the malkhana and two other officials for misappropriating and replacing a huge quantity of drugs deposited as case property.

Additional District and Sessions Judge Sehrish Tedar of the Model Criminal Trial Court (East) also directed the city police chief to place the three police officials under suspension till the completion of the inquiry against them and submit a compliance report.

The proceedings emanated when court policeman Ajab Khan, who is the in charge of the malkhana,produced fake articles in lieu of the contrabands recovered from suspects at the time of their arrest.

Huge quantity of opium and hashish sealed as case property was found to have been replaced with stones, mud

The judge noted that after recording evidence of prosecution witnesses and court witnesses, it was observed with great pain that a huge quantity of contraband was recovered by police from the accused and later on criminally misappropriated so as to give benefit to the accused.

She observed that the prime responsibility of criminal misappropriation lied around investigating officer (IO), Inspector Syed Asif Ali, malkhana in charge Assistant Sub-Inspector Ajab Khan, who received the case property since the property remained in their hands from the day one till it was misappropriated.

“Under these circumstances, I hereby direct the additional inspector general Karachi to conduct departmental inquiry regarding criminal misappropriation of the case property within 30 days under intimation to this court and if any person is found involved, strict departmental action shall be initiated under Section 409 PPC read with Criminal Law amendment 1958 against the delinquent police officer so that in future no police official could dare to involve himself in corrupt practices.”

According to the prosecution, on Jan 28, the in charge was handed over one plastic bag containing 38 packets of opium weighing 38 kilogramme and second bag containing 22 kilograms of charas along with the chemical analysis report to be kept in the safe custody at the malkhana.

When the case was taken up on Feb 11, the said case property were called from the malkhana and it was found to contain ‘stones’ in one bag duly painted and the other bag contained ‘mud’ duly packed so as to look like the case property.

It further mentioned that police had arrested suspect Khalid near the PCSIR Laboratory on Feb 4 last year and claimed to have seized 38kg opium and 22kg hashish.

It said that during initial interrogation, Khalid disclosed that hashish belonged to his alleged accomplice Abdul Haq, who had managed to flee from the scene.

A case was registered under Sections 6 and 9-C of the Control of Narcotic Substances Act, 1997 at the Mubina Town police station.

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2022