KARACHI: Drive against arms not to succeed unless process changed
By Arman Sabir
KARACHI, June 18: A deweaponization campaign cannot bear fruit unless the recovery system is improved and an audit of malkhana (warehouse), where case property is deposited, is carried out properly and regularly, well-placed sources in police department said.
The government recently announced that it was considering launching a nationwide deweaponization campaign again, as the previous campaign initiated in 2001 had not been very fruitful.
Police had raided several places in the city on tip-off and seized a number of unlicensed weapons and ammunition during the previous campaign, the sources said and added that the police had also found unlicensed weapons in the boxes which had been placed outside every police station urging people to surrender their unlicensed weapons voluntarily.
However, the sources said, the police had failed to make an inventory about the recovery of unclaimed weapons. Quite often the police show these weapons as ‘recovered’ from an innocent person and book him under the arms ordinance.
Shedding light on the usefulness of this practice, a police official at a police station said: “No one can check this practice. We cannot follow the rules, as at times when we arrest a suspect, we don’t have any evidence to involve him in a crime despite the fact that we know for sure that he is a criminal. In such cases, we can at least arrest him for keeping an unlicensed TT pistol or any other weapon.”
Another policeman said that the inventory of the unclaimed weapons was usually not made and the weapons remained were with respective police stations. “We submit a weapon to malkhana if it is case property and the alleged possessor of the weapon is tried in a court,” a police official explained.
Official sources said the unclaimed arms and ammunition seized by the police were not submitted to the malkhana. The sources close to the police department said that there was no proper procedure to submit the unclaimed weapons which were seized by law-enforcement agencies. The recoveries were hardly ever put on the record, thus creating fear of their being misappropriated.
An elected member of the city government, on condition of anonymity, said: “Our police keep unlicensed weapons in every police station and there is a possibility of misappropriation of such weapons as anyone in a police station, who is faced with financial constraints, can sell them out to criminals.”
The sources said the government’s campaign for deweaponization could only be successful if a proper record of the recovered unlicensed weapons was maintained and they were deposited to central malkhana. The annual audit of malkhana was also necessary to keep the record of case property updated.
A report submitted to the Sindh government in April 2000 by the then district magistrate South said that due to unavailability of the record, he failed to carry out proper inspections to ascertain the quantity of weapons stored at the malkhana on the premises of the city courts.
The report said that the “malkhana is housed in an old building where stores of five erstwhile districts Malkhanas have been adjusted in one big hall. Disorder was, therefore quite evident.”
The report further stated that the official in charge of malkhana was directed to prepare a thanawise list of all items deposited in malkhana and submit it through SSP (South) to the presiding officers of various courts with a request to intimate whether the cases of such items stand disposed of. Moreover, the probability of shifting of malkhana to a proper building may be explored by the then ADM (South) along with officer in charge of nazarat.
According to rules, annual audit of the deposits in the malkhana is mandatory. But, the sources said, the audit had not been conducted for the past four decades. If a thorough checking was made, discrepancies would be found between the recoveries of unclaimed and illegal arms and of those submitted in the malkhana, the sources further claimed.
