ISLAMABAD, June 18: While bidding for Pakistan Telecommunication Company (PTCL) shares was in progress on Saturday, the law enforcement agencies kept seven leaders of the PTCL Workers Unions Action Committee detained at an undisclosed location.
Action committee spokesman Azad Qadri told Dawn that a political party had requested the leaders — Lala Hanif, Latif Qureshi, Malik Maqbool, Qazi Rashid, Zafar Zaidi, Shamim and Syed Sirajul Hassan — to hold talks with the government with an assurance that they would not be arrested if the talks failed.
However, Mr Qadri said, the workers leaders had been detained by the government at an undisclosed location since Friday morning.
He added: “At 9:30 pm, I called M Qureshi on his cell phone and he told me that the action committee leaders were facing massive pressure and had been asked at gun point to sign a deal but they had refused.”
He said the law enforcement agencies were not allowing the leaders to disclose the place of their detention or share information about representatives of the government in the talks.
However, sources told Dawn that the leaders had been detained at the headquarters of a secret agency.
Mr Qadri said the ratio of attendance of the PTCL’s technical staff remained zero across the country on Saturday though they were repeatedly receiving threats from the law enforcement agencies.
He added the action committee would decide on Sunday (today) whether to continue the strike or not.
Our Correspondent from Quetta adds: Hundreds of members of the PTCL employees’ union and the Balochistan United Labour and Workers Federation staged a demonstration in protest against the privatization of the state-run telecommunication company. The protesters called upon the government to reverse the privatization process in the larger interest of the nation.
Members of the employees union’ and BULWF gathered in front of the Quetta Press Club on Saturday and chanted slogans against the privatization of the institution.
Sajid Lodhi of the PTCL employees’ union and Khan Zaman of BULWF strongly condemned the government’s unilateral policy of privatizing the profit-earning institution without any sound reason.
They claimed that it was a universally recognized principle to privatize only those companies that suffered losses and whose management could not run affairs properly either in view of the burden of large-scale employees or other factors.
Speakers pointed out that Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd was the sole state-run institution that provided billion of rupees to the national exchequer every year.
