April 7, 2003	Monday	Safar 4, 1424

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RAWALPINDI, April 6: The district police, in a crackdown on Sunday, arrested five plaza owners for allegedly carrying out substandard construction, while the owner of Bano Arcade which collapsed on Friday, disappeared with his family.

New Town police station SHO Sohail Ijaz told Dawn that five separate FIRs had been registered against the owners of under-construction buildings after the construction material being used by them was found of poor quality. The work on the buildings has been stopped.

In another development, Sheikh Anwar Aqeel, the owner of Bano Arcade, has disappeared with his family members from his residence, and police efforts to arrest him have proved unproductive. The police are conducting raids to trace him.

Meanwhile, a source in the Tehsil Municipal Administration (TMA) told Dawn that 28 commercial buildings had been constructed in the city in violation of approved design.

A report had been submitted to Tehsil Nazim Raja Hamid Nawaz about these illegally-constructed buildings by the TMA architect, but it went missing, and is yet to be traced, the source said. The file containing Bano Arcade’s record is also missing, he added.

Inspection of these buildings had been ordered and was scheduled to start from April 1. However, it was postponed after the report went missing.

These 28 buildings are located in some of the city’s busiest areas like Murree Road, Saidpur Road, Iqbal Road, Commercial Market, Chandni Chowk and Sixth Road.

However, provincial local government minister Raja Basharat, at a press conference on Friday, claimed that only four buildings in the city had been constructed in violation of prescribed design.

It should be recalled that initial assessments made by the agencies working on the plaza collapse are pointing towards violation of construction design as one of the causes of the incident. Poor quality of construction material has been cited as another reason.

The source, pointing towards TMA building branch’s involvement in encouraging design violation, said no notices had been issued by the branch to the plaza owner after 2001, contrary to Tehsil administration’s claims of having issued numerous notices in this regard.

Those accusing the TMA building branch of this negligence support their claim on two questions — What was the time limit of those notices? and what action had been initiated subsequent to the expiry of that time period?

They claim that the officials on Saturday filled up post- dated notices and put up their copies in files in a bid to save their neck.

Tehsil Nazim Raja Hamid Nawaz, when contacted, did not deny this, and said it was also being investigated by the team constituted to probe the Friday’s incident.

Meanwhile, suspension of Tehsil planning and coordination officer and two building inspectors by the administration has raised several eye-brows, as one of the main characters in the the building department making fortune by patronizing illegal construction, has been left out.

The sources said the said person enjoyed patronage of some bigwigs of the ruling group. He had been notorious for his corrupt practices, and some claim that he was at Bano Arcade, an hour before its collapse, to get his share in return for ignoring the violation.

The Tehsil Nazim, when asked about the absence of the person’s name from the list of suspended officials, said: “He, too, will be suspended”.