GUJRANWALA, April 9: Employees of the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE), including the clerical staff, went on a pen-down strike on Wednesday to protest the dismissal of their colleague from service allegedly without providing him a defence opportunity.

BISE Chairman M. Akram Chaudhry had sacked a clerk, Imran Cheema of matriculation branch, on charges of misplacing admission forms of candidates and not issuing their roll number slips for annual examination 2008.

All employees of the board went on pen-down strike after boycotting the examination process.

BISE Employees Welfare Association President Chaudhry Bashir Ahmad Cheema told reporters that the government had decided conducting Class-IX and Class-X examinations separately, but the board had not recruited abundant staff and it overburdened the existing staff and handling over 200,000 candidates was not an easy job for them. He said the BISE chairman should have ordered an inquiry against the clerk concerned following issuing him show cause notice instead of straight away dismissing him from service. The association president demanded that clerk should be reinstated immediately otherwise they would continue their strike.

The BISE chairman said the clerk was a contract-based employee and was also involved in corruption. He said the board dismissed him after paying him one-month salary in advance.

FIA: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) personnel raided two travel agencies in Kamoki and seized a large number of passports and identity cards and arrested two agency owners on Wednesday.

Both the agencies were luring people to send them abroad illegally after changing their photos on passports. A team headed by FIA assistant director Azeem Hussain raided the VIP Travelling Agency and Al-Madina Travelling Agency and recovered 18 passports and 10 identity cards from the former while eight passports and 10 identity cards from the latter and arrested their owners, Irfan and Arif Mahmood, respectively.

A case has been registered against the owners and investigations are underway. Another FIA team arrested as many as 41 people who were deported by Turkish government besides seven human agents here on Wednesday.

FIA additional director Husain Ashger stated this while addressing a briefing at his office. He said that deportees who were arrested from Islamabad airport belonged to Sialkot, Gujrat, Mandi Bahauddin, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura districts and were being quizzed.

He said the FIA had also arrested seven human agents – Pervaiz Akhtar, Tariq, Navid Hassan, Muhammad Khalid, Muhammad Younas, Mazher Husain and Pervaiz Hassan in separate raids from various districts.