THIS refers to the front-page report “Row over ad about ‘unknown Rangers’” (Oct 7)

I would have thought that if a DSP-level police officer, after following due process and seeking permission and recommendation from his superior, inserted advertisements in newspapers seeking information from the public about certain individuals who were picked up from the locality under his jurisdiction, by unknown Rangers and have disappeared since without trace, then the officer deserved to be commended for his duty-consciousness and extended all help by other agencies.

But the next thing we hear is that Sindh Home Minister Suhail Anwar Siyal took notice of the advertisement and then Sindh IG Ghulam Hyder Jamali set up an inquiry committee to look into the matter.

However, no committee has been formed to find the ways to speed up the recovery of the persons picked up by Rangers. Instead the committee will investigate how a DSP dared to put advertisements in newspapers which could bring a bad name to the Rangers. This view is reinforced by the news that the DSP in question has been suspended.

The MQM has been quite vocal about the torture, extra-judicial killing and disappearances of dozens of its workers but these were declared in parliament to be false and misleading by the federal interior minister while the complaint was also dismissed by Rangers. And now when a senior police official makes an honest and serious attempt to trace some of them, he is suspended. And the committee which was proposed at the start of the Karachi operation two years back and which was supposed to ensure that the operation was conducted in a just and impartial manner has not yet been formed.

S.R.H. Hashmi
Karachi

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2015

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