HARIPUR, Nov 4: A joint team comprising Khalabat police and forest department officials seized high quality timber in Khalabat township. The team also arrested the smuggler and a heavy fine was imposed. The price of the seized timber is reportedly in millions.

According to forest department sources, District Forest Officer Hashim Ali Khan was informed about the smuggling of two truckloads of high quality wood from Kala Dhaka to Haripur via Tarbela lake.

He constituted a raiding party which cordoned off the route leading to the lake.

However, the smugglers changed their destination and offloaded their illegal consignment at some other place on a side of Tarbela lake and transported it to a sawing machine shop in Khalabat township.

The raiding party raided the sawing machine shop and recovered the illegal timber stored in the godown of Khalid Khan.

The DFO Haripur under forest laws imposed a fine of Rs280,000 on the saw-machine owner on the spot.

It may be recalled that despite employing various strategies to stop timber smuggling, illegal deforestation and smuggling could not be checked courtesy the black sheep in the forest department and other law enforcement agencies.

According to a source, four to six truckloads of timber is smuggled out of upper parts of Hazara via Tarbela lake and transported to the rest of the country daily in connivance with the forest department officials and police.

It was reported that there were four gangs of timber smugglers operating in Haripur alone.

To check timber smuggling via lake route, a former deputy commissioner of Haripur had proposed giving registration numbers to all the ferries operating in the Tarbela lake at night, besides painting them with different colours specified for their routes and banning their loading and offloading after sunset.

However, due to reasons unknown the proposal could not be materialised.