PESHAWAR: Employees of the public health engineering department in North Waziristan Agency on Tuesday accused a senior clerk of the department for withholding their salaries for last six months and demanded of Khyber Pakht-unkhwa Governor Iqbal Zafar Jhagra to act against the ‘influential’ official.

Speaking at a news conference at the Peshawar Press Club, public health workers union press secretary Anwarullah Khan said the senior clerk had not paid salaries to workers and had been avoiding to come to the office for past two months.

He said following complaints of the workers the superintending engineer concerned had ordered probe into the case and the accused person had admitted misusing the amount, but the government was yet to recover it from the official.

Mr Anwar warned the employees would stop water supply to the entire local population from Oct 25 if the governor did not ensure recovery of their dues.

“The accused person, Faheem Khan, had admitted before the inquiry team that he had misused about Rs4million and promised to pay back to the workers at the earliest but did not do so,” the union leader said and added when the concerned political agent issued arrest warrant of the official he disappeared.

He said the senior clerk claimed to have full support of the Fata secretariat officials and no one could force him to pay the salaries. “There are about 310 employees and many of them have not been paid salaries for three months,” he said.

Mr Anwar said the official had also confiscated service books of employees and warned them to stop demanding their salaries otherwise they would lose the record of service.

He said the employees belonged to poor families and if the salaries were not paid they would be unable to meet their routine expenditures.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2017