09 February 2004	Monday	17 Zilhaj 1424

HANGU, Feb 8: A police station here is receiving telephone calls from foreign countries for the last 15 days, officials said. The officials said that the telephone calls were made from Canada, Japan, US, England, Germany, Korea, Hong Kong and others.

Some of the telephone numbers from which the calls were made had also been detected through the Caller's Line Identification (CLI). They said that when they informed the concerned officials of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) about the situation, they replied that the lines had overlapped, but the fault was not removed.

The police station authorities also invited the local reporters to witness the situation on Monday. They stayed there for one hour and were surprised to see that several phone calls from abroad were received.

An official on duty at the Hangu police station, when contacted on telephone, said that the situation had disturbed the officials of the night shift as most of the calls were received during night. "On some days, we received calls in hundreds," he said, adding that all the callers told them that they were trying to call Islamabad or Rawalpindi.

"Just two minutes before you called, I disconnected a call from a foreign country," the official said, adding that they could do nothing except disconnecting all foreign calls as soon as they saw a foreign country's phone code on the CLI.