MARDAN: The district prison officials here have accused the jail superintendent of deducting conveyance allowance from their salary and charging rent of the government flats they are residing in, and demanded probe into the matter.

Talking to Dawn on Wednesday on condition of anonymity, they said the jail superintendent Sahibzada Shahjehan had been deducting Rs1,932 as conveyance allowance from their salary, and Rs550 rent per room for last four months. They said two officials resided in a single room of the government flats located on the jail premises.

The officials said they had also protested against the superintendent’s action, but to no avail. “There are about 372 jail officials who have been suffering from the move of the superintendent,” they lamented.

They said there were around 24 prisons and jails across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, but only the superintendent of Mardan jail was cutting conveyance allowance from the salary of his subordinate officials.

They claimed that the Peshawar High Court’s Abbotabbad circuit bench had issued an order last year restraining the relevant authorities from deducting any allowance from all jail officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. As per the Pakistan Prison Rules, all officials of jail department would be provided free residential facility, they said, adding the present superintendent of Mardan jail was not only violating the rules but also misusing his powers.

Besides, they also alleged that the jail superintendent had kept extra staff to look after his domestic animals, saying one of his three gunmen had been deputed to his brother who was a businessman.

The jail officials appealed to the chief minister, chief justice of Peshawar High Court and IGP to restrain the jail superintendent from ‘misusing’ his powers.

Despite repeated attempts no official from the superintendent’s office responded to the calls to seek his comment on the matter. However, deputy superintendent Mukhtiyar Haider Khan admitted that conveyance allowance was being deduced from the salary of jail officials.

He said they were in contact with their head office in this connection and hoped that a suitable solution would be found.

He, however, said all the charges leveled against the jail superintendent were baseless.

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2016

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