KARACHI: A security guard caught ‘red-handed’ in a Karachi University department on Tuesday evening escaped the campus in the presence of teachers and security staff, it emerged here on Wednesday.

Sources told Dawn that it was the fourth incident of theft on the campus within four weeks and the thief was suspected to be a key member of a gang involved in such crimes in the KU, they added.

No FIR has been registered in any of the cases.

According to the sources, a senior security guard, Javed, was caught inside the room of the chairperson of the chemical engineering department that he had broken into and had taken away Rs25,000.

“He was caught red-handed as the chowkidar present there immediately reported the matter to the security office. Later, a number of teachers also arrived there,” a teacher at the department said.

The robber, he said, was taken to the campus security office and was interrogated by security staff and teachers. But as police arrived, the man ‘disappeared’. He also alleged that the suspect came to the department on a motorbike ridden by the driver of a senior KU teacher.

“When police arrived, his colleagues said that he was in the washroom. But when some time passed and the man didn’t come out, the police went inside the washroom and saw that no one was there,” he said, adding that the university administration called a brother of the suspect, who was also a campus employee, and handed him over to the police.

When the university administration was approached for a version, officials gave contradictory statements. While the campus secretary, the top official responsible for university security, admitted that the ‘red-handed caught thief’ had escaped and his brother had been handed over to police, the university registrar insisted that the suspect had been arrested and was in police custody.

KU campus secretary Mohmmad Zubair, an associate professor at the Islamic history department, said: “The suspect managed to escape and police are interrogating his brother. No FIR has been registered.”

University registrar Prof Moazzam Ali Khan, however, said: “He was caught while he was inside the room of the department chairperson and is now in the police custody. An FIR has been registered and police are investigating about the lost amount.”

When contacted, an official of the Mubina police station said: “The thief escaped from the custody of university staff. His brother is at the police station only for interrogation and would be released tomorrow. No FIR has so far been registered.”

According to university teachers, thefts had become a routine affair on the campus and there had been at least three such incidents over the past four weeks. Thefts, they said, had occurred in the biotechnology and statistics departments and a teacher’s home.

Teachers also claimed that the number of thefts was more than the reported by the administration that often hushed up such cases. Most thefts, they said, were committed by internal staff and there were hardly any case in which a criminal was punished.

The internal mechanism of the university, they said, had just failed to check the law and order situation that had emerged mainly because of continued political interference in university affairs and the strategy to take administrative decisions lacked merit.

These reasons, they said, prevented the university administration from lodging an FIR as criminals had political support.

“Only three days ago, our seminar library was broken into and Rs5,000 was taken away. All locks and furniture were found damaged in the morning,” said a teacher at the statistics department.

Another teacher at the biotechnology department said that more than a dozen fans were found stolen from the biotechnology department last month.

A thief, sources said, recently struck at house C-97 on the campus and took away washroom fixtures.

The university administration had set up a security committee about two months ago to look into law and order issues on the campus and recommend measures to bring an improvement in the current security structure.

The committee headed by campus secretary included Prof Zulqarnain Shahdab, chairperson of the Urdu department, and Dr Anila Amber, head of the psychology department.

Published in Dawn, July 10th, 2014