VEHARI, April 17: People here on Saturday strongly protested against long electricity outages in hot weather. A group of people told Dawn that power supply remained suspended for more than 10 hours on Saturday.

When contacted, Mepco officials said the power supply was suspended due to repair work online in the Faisal Town area. When this scribe visited the area, no repair work was going on anywhere.

A Mepco source said the company had completed the repair work last month.

A senior official showed his ignorance about the power breakdown. Similar was the reply of an official at the grid station. The XEN was not available in his office for his comments.

Another official claimed that the shutdown was being observed on the orders of national control centre in Islamabad.

Meanwhile, a large number of people at the Mepco consumer centre alleged that they were receiving inflated electricity bills.

Transformers: Danywal police recovered 24 electricity transformers and a huge quantity of mobile oil in two separate raids on Friday night.

A police squad raided the shop of Jamil and Arshad in Shaheen Market and recovered 24 transformers.

Police said the transformers were brought to the shop on the plea of repairing from various parts of the district by some senior Mepco officials and sold to the shopkeepers.

The suspects made good their escape.

In the other incident on a tip off, police raided the house of a mobile oil company general manager, Khurshid Ali, and recovered stolen mobile oil worth about Rs100,000.

Police claimed that Khurshid was involved in stealing mobile oil with the help of other employees of the company.