MULTAN, May 2: A chief minister inspection team’s member completed inquiry on Monday into a sexual harassment allegations against a senior orthopaedic surgeon of the Nishter Hospital and Medical College. CMIT’s member Brig Tauqeer (retired) stayed here for three days and kept on working on his assignment even on Sunday in the office of NMC&H’s board of management chairman.

The inquiry officer is likely to submit his report to the CMIT chairman by the end of this week.

The horrific incident of sexual harassment allegedly committed by Prof Dr Ashiq Pervez was reported last month. The victim’s husband had lodged the complaint on April 4 last with the NMC&H principal executive officer Prof Dr Shabbir Nasir.

The complainant, an English language teacher at a state-run postgraduate institution, had alleged that the surgeon molested his wife a night before their son was to be operated upon for a knee surgery. He alleged the surgeon piled pressure on his wife to ‘cooperate’ otherwise anything could happen to her son.

The principal had forwarded the application to the Punjab health secretary for only his office was competent to take/suggest action against a senior official. The health department had reportedly proposed suspension of the accused besides initiation of an inquiry against him in a summery sent to the CM secretariat.

However, in the following couple of weeks, the matter remained in the cold storage of officialdom. In the meanwhile, Punjab Health Minister Dr Tahir Ali Javed kept on issuing unsubstantiated statements about the case. He had on record stated on several occasions that an inquiry into the sexual harassment case was underway and that a report from the NMC&H BoM had also been sought in this regard.

But, in reality neither any inquiry was being carried out nor the Nishter’s management board had ever been asked to furnish a report. BoM’s chairman Khwaja Jalaluddin Roomi had repeatedly refuted the claim that he had ever been asked to submit a report about the alleged sexual harassment issue.

Finally, the chief minister directed on April 27 last his inspection team chairman Shuja Khanzada to appoint a member of his squad to probe the matter and submit a report within a fortnight. The chairman appointed Brig Tauqeer to investigate the matter.

The inquiry officer reportedly recorded statements of the victim, her husband, the accused professor, a lady doctor of the hospital’s family ward (where the victim stayed for the operation of her son) and the NMC&H’s PEO. Besides, he also met with BoM chairman Jalaluddin Roomi and some of its members.

A delegation of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan also met with Brig Tauqeer to urge him to conduct an impartial inquiry.

The right activists informed the inquiry officer that they had consciously restrained themselves from launching an agitation in public just not to shake the credibility of an institution where hundreds of patients came daily for treatment. The HRCP delegation also urged the inquiry officer to provide it a copy of his findings.