KARACHI, Sept 29: The recently set up traffic police kiosk underneath the Hassan Square flyover on University Road has become a source of harassment for motorists as the police personnel deployed there are often found committing gross violations of traffic rules and plaguing the lives of vehicle-owners.

Most often, the cops manning the kiosk emerge suddenly on the adjacent road riding bikes or mobile vans and drive along the wrong side causing considerable inconvenience to those driving their vehicles in perfect order. Even the lifters, hired by the traffic police to detain the wrongly parked vehicles, often move in the opposite direction of the road only to disrupt a smooth flow of vehicular traffic.

It is observed that whenever a lifter, taking away a detained car, moves on the road, it denies right of way to the following vehicles on two lanes of the busy road and hinders the traffic flow right from the Hassan Square intersection up to the Nipa Chowrangi, besides posing a threat of collision to the vehicle moving around.

People visiting the Ashfaq Memorial Hospital and the nearby shops and hotels have complained that the policemen posted at this particular kiosk have made it their habit to detain cars at their whim and these include the vehicles which are parked correctly. “They take away the cars parked far away from the newly-created U-turns on the either side of the University Road although they are supposed to detain only the illegally parked ones,” they argued, adding that the traffic police had not even bothered to fix a “No Parking” signboard to warn people against wrong parking.

Since most of the “punished” car-owners or drivers appeared to be visitors of a nearby health facility, they are obviously in a hurry and park their vehicles as soon as they find some space around the hospital. But they come to know about their vehicle going missing only after coming out of the hospital. “One fails to realise immediately whether one’s car has been taken away by some carjackers or the traffic police… and being in a state of shock and confusion, one cannot also decide whether to go to the police station concerned to lodge an FIR or refer to the traffic police post concerned to get the car released,” they say.

Upon establishing that the car has actually been detained, the affected person has to rush to the Hassan Square police kiosk in panic, they say.

The traffic police personnel charge between Rs600 and Rs700 to release a detained four-wheeler in spite of the fact that the fine is just Rs300. The remaining amount is described as “lifter service charge”.

Claiming that most of the affected people were their customers, operators of several restaurants and shops located along the Hassan Square-Nipa Chowrangi section of the University Road allege that the staff of this traffic police kiosk had made it their “business” to take away vehicles and extort the customers.

“The traffic cops are punishing us for our refusal to pay them Bhatta (extortion money) on a regular basis,” some of them alleged.

They also claimed that a large number of cars usually remained parked in a haphazard manner in front of the eateries near the Hassan Square intersection but none of these was detained by the traffic police.

No traffic police spokesman was available for comment.