LAHORE: Working under the command of Capital City Police Officer Umar Sheikh seems to have become a ‘nightmare’ for the police officers as he has shown the door to yet another one — SSP Investigation Abdul Ghaffar Qaisrani — over a ‘petty issue’.

Mr Sheikh got upset during a meeting held late on Tuesday for an official matter and then suddenly ‘ordered’ Mr Qaisrani to leave the venue saying, “Your services are no more required to me”.

The CCPO’s order was so sudden and unexpected that the SSP investigation and other senior police officers for a moment couldn’t understand the gravity of the situation, a senior official told Dawn. However, he said, the senior officers were left red-faced when the CCPO repeated his order and Abdul Ghaffar Qaisrani obeyed the very next moment.

The SSP Investigation brought the matter to the notice of the IGP and didn’t join duty on Wednesday.

The matter was the “arrest of PML-N workers in the wake of the Dec 13 public meeting of the PDM in Lahore at Minar-i-Pakistan,” he said. During the meeting, the CCPO assigned task to both operations and investigation police to arrest the workers of the opposition party ahead of the scheduled public meeting. Mr Qaisrani raised an objection to the proposal and said the prime duty of such arrests was of the operations wing. He suggested to the CCPO to let the investigation wing do its original work and this dissenting note irritated Mr Sheikh and led to the unhappy incident.

The official also linked the matter to an ‘action’ of Mr Qaisrani against two divisional SPs of investigation wing posted in Lahore. He said Mr Qaisrani had recently issued ‘letter of advice’ to these divisional SPs showing his displeasure over some disparities and flaws in investigation of the cases they handled. This action was later brought to the notice of the CCPO who called it an unnecessary punishment to the SPs — the officers who were posted by him in Lahore.

The official said Mr Qaisrani had been shown the door almost two months after his posting as Lahore SSP Investigation. Ironically, he was the choice of the CCPO.

Hardly a week ago, Lahore DIG Investigation Shahzada Sultan was transferred by the Punjab government following his differences with the CCPO.

Similarly, he had surrendered the services of Crime Investigation Agency’s Asim Iftikhar after heated argument with him at a meeting on Oct 15.

Published in Dawn, December 10th, 2020