KOHAT: The district administration has announced to restart work on Faraz Park which was suspended in 2014 and asked the authorities concerned to prepare a fresh plan for it.

Assistant commissioner Abdur Rehman called a meeting of the concerned department and officials in his office and asked them to remove all bottlenecks halting the park work. He said that a new tender should be floated for its construction and a contractor be hired who had the expertise and machinery to work at the mountainous site.

He also sought a report detailing reasons for suspension of the work for such a long period.

Former governor Barrister Masud Kausar had earmarked Rs20 million for the said park in 2013. He had released the initial grant of Rs6 million and given the task to tehsil municipal administration to complete it by 2014.

However, the funds meant for the park were unaccounted for, as two contractors ran away and no recovery had been made from them. Only incomplete administration block and security post could be constructed which were crumbling down besides the boundary wall.

The TMA had acquired 230 kanals located in Jarma on the University Road for the park in view of growing population to provide the city dwellers an outing place. The government had increased the grant to Rs60 million for it at that time.

A visit to the area revealed that the park had been sanctioned behind a mountain which was hard to dig. It would require huge machinery to remove the mountain first.

A TMA official Imtiaz Ahmed told this scribe that the project would need fresh funds, including the cost escalation, and work on it could only be started from scratch which would need a revised PC-1. He said that TMA had no money to fund such a big project, which was only possible if the chief minister was approached.

ARRESTED: The police and elite force arrested a drug peddler and three proclaimed offenders in Junglekhel in intelligence-based operations. According to police, the operations started on Saturday midnight and continued till wee hours of Sunday.

During the operations headed by SP operations Silahuddin Kundi and DSP Sanobar Shah, 10 non-local and 10 local suspicious people were also arrested and cases registered against them. Their challans were presented in the special court of a magistrate on Sunday.

The alleged drug peddler, Jehanzeb, was held with a big quantity of hashish. Three proclaimed offenders were also arrested. One kalashnikov, one shotgun, nine pistols and 150 cartridges besides drugs were also seized from the suspects.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2018