TOBA TEK SINGH: Kissan Board leaders from Gojra - advocate Abdul Rahman Jami, Dr Attaullah Hameed, and Rana Kashif Mahmood Azmi – told a press conference on Sunday that Passco released 2,000 gunny bags to unidentified people and showed in its record as issued to Kissan Board.

They said that despite their request, Passco officials failed to give them the list of Kissan Board activists who had been given bags. They said that bags had been issued to traders by taking bribes or on the recommendation of ruling party office bearers.

They demanded that the deputy commissioner hold an inquiry into the case as middlemen or commission agents were benefiting from supplying substandard wheat at the government’s fixed price of Rs3,900 per 40 kg to Passco by falsely purchasing bags from Passco officials.

BOILERS: The Environment Department arrested six people for de-sealing the boilers of three cotton yarn sizing units in Small Industrial Estate at Faisalabad.

A press release said Deputy Director Johar Abbas Randhawa inspected the units along with the police and found broken seals and the environment was being polluted by burning prohibited materials, on which the boilers of the units were re-sealed under the Punjab Environmental Protection (Smog Prevention and Control) Rules of 2023.

DROWN: Two children drowned in a deep sewage nullah at Khanewal in Nizamabad locality on Sunday.

Both deceased children identified as Husnain Asad and Fahad Aslam were playing around the nullah when one of them slipped into it and the other one jumped in to rescue him but both could not come out.

Rescue 1122 pulled out Fahad and rushed him to DHQ hospital but he expired there while the body of Husnain was fished out.

HELD: A woman, her three daughters, and their two unidentified accomplices were booked on Sunday by Toba Sadar police for killing a youth in Chak 389 JB.

Complainant Hasan Mahmood of Sarfraz Colony said in his FIR that his son Hamza was asleep in his outhouse on farmland when Riffat Bibi, her daughters Mubarra, Ruqayya, and Fizza, all of Chak 388 JB, and their two unidentified accomplices shot him dead.

He added in the FIR that the woman had lured the deceased that she would arrange his marriage with Mubarra and extorted Rs7.5 million from him but later did not meet her words. The deceased demanded his money, to which the woman with her daughters and accomplices killed his son. Police have arrested the four women.

MEETING: Faisalabad City Anjuman Tajran members in a meeting on Sunday condemned the anti-encroachment operation launched by the municipal corporation in which sheds of shops are being dismantled in the bazaars.

The meeting demanded Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz and Commissioner Silwat Saeed take notice of the bullying of the officials, otherwise the businessmen will be forced to take to the streets.

Published in Dawn, May 6th, 2024