LANDI KOTAL: Authorities at Torkham border allowed stranded vehicles loaded with Pakistani export and Afghan Transit Trade goods to go back to Peshawar and other cities of the country after a protest demonstration by the transporters on Monday.

Officials said that as many as 180 trucks and containers loaded with cement, wheat flour, vegetables and other edibles along with unspecified foreign goods imported for Afghanistan under the Afghan Transit Trade Agreement were stranded near the border since February 17 when Pakistan closed all its borders with Afghanistan.

Most of the vehicles were parked in the open with majority of them had their tyres flattened and edible items getting rotten owing to lack of cooling and preservation facilities.

It was second time during the last five days that the affected transporters held a protest demonstration to demand of the authorities to allow their vehicles to proceed to their destinations.

Protesting transporters say they suffered huge losses

Authorities allowed the vehicles to leave the border immediately after the transporters held the protest.

Haji Azeemullah, a spokesman for agitating transporters, told Dawn that the truckers would go back to their terminals in Peshawar to offload their goods.

BLAST: The boundary wall of a reconstructed government primary school for girls was slightly damaged in a late night blast in Janikhel area of Shalobar in Bara.

It was the first incident of a bomb blast in any government school in Bara since the return of internally displaced persons to the region in 2014.

Nobody claimed responsibility for the blast.

PROTEST: The students of Government Degree College Landi Kotal have threatened to hold a protest on March 16 against lack of some basic facilities in their institution.

Talking to journalists here on Sunday, they said that they had been demanding reopening of the college hostel, provision of transport facility and release of their annual tribal scholarship along with provision of water and electricity for a long time but to no avail.

They alleged that the college management rented out some rooms of their hostel to employees of a bank in Torkham while students were living in rented flats in Landi Kotal Bazaar and a private hostel in Peshawar. They said that students of Loe and Kam Shalman were affected the most owing to prolonged closure of their hostel.

Meanwhile, the teachers of community schools across Khyber Agency have demanded release of their salaries.

During a meeting in Jamrud the other day, the teachers termed nonpayment of their salaries without any specific reason their ‘economic murder’.

All Teachers Association president Naseer Shah said that teachers were not paid salaries for the last nine months. He said that it confronted most of the community teachers with acute financial crises.

The teachers threatened to go on hunger strike if their salaries were not released forthwith.

PPP: The local chapter of PPP on Sunday staged a protest demonstration in Landi Kotal against the shortage of doctors and lack of facilities in agency headquarters hospital.

PPP Khyber president Hazrat Wali said on the occasion that at least 12 posts of specialist doctors were vacant for a long time while no free medicines were provided to the needy patients at the medical store.

He said that modern machinery and equipment worth millions of rupees were rusting in the hospital stores owing to absence of qualified technical staff.

Published in Dawn, March 14th, 2017