February 20, 2007	Tuesday	Safar 2, 1428

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ISLAMABAD, Feb 19: Police indifference to the victims of an armed robbery on the fringe of the capital city on Monday ignited a public protest which blocked the G.T. Road for an hour.

People were infuriated that while the robbers fled and their victim bled, officers of the police stations of Sabzimandi of Islamabad and Westridge of Rawalpindi refused to respond to their calls for help, claiming the scene of incident lay in the other’s jurisdiction.

The protest ended only after political leaders and senior police officials of Rawalpindi promised that the Westridge police would register a case and investigate the robbery, the second to hit a businessman of the city in four days.

It all started when armed robbers intercepted a van of the Dawn Bread factory carrying cash to Rawalpindi just after it had crossed Naseerabad Chowki. The security guard of the van, Abdul Rasheed, was hit in the ensuing exchange of fire and the robbers made away with the Rs750,000 the van was carrying.

Police was immediately alerted but the calls made to ‘Rescue-15’ got mired into the controversy which police station should respond to the call for help. Meantime security guard Rasheed continued to bleed as no state-run hospital would touch him unless some police station owned that he was hit in its precinct.

Eventually the injured guard was taken to a private hospital for treatment.

After two agonising hours, officers of the Sabzimandi police station arrived to inspect the scene of the crime, only to declare that it lay in the jurisdiction of the Westridge police station and not theirs.

Angered by the devil-may-care attitude of the police, workers of the bread factory and people of the Naseerabad area and market blocked traffic on the busy G.T. Road.

Chief executive of Dawn Bread, Abdullah Bukhari, described police’s attitude as “very irresponsible and shameful”. Much less than attending to their duty of collecting evidence and going after the criminals, it did not even attend to the injured guard, he said.

He said two days earlier robbers, posing as policemen, had entered his Capital Cable factory in Naseerabad “to investigate a murder case” and carted away Rs4 million worth of cables by holding the factory workers at gunpoint. Police, raising the jurisdiction issue, have not registered his report about that robbery as yet, he said.

Mr Bukhari suspected political rivalries lay behind the controversy over police jurisdiction. Punjab’s Local Government and Law Minister Raja Basharat tries to get crimes in the area to be registered by Islamabad police while opposition Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians MNA Zamarud Khan wants the Rawalpindi police to do that, according to the twice-bitten businessman.