LAHORE: Gunmen took away medicines worth over Rs15 million from the medical store depot of the primary and secondary health department on Multan Road on Tuesday.

The most-worrying part of the theft is that the suspects also took away 522 cartons of medicines declared substandard by the Drug Testing Laboratory (DTL). These included 236 cartons of Septran (tablets) and 286 cartons of Augmentin tablets. The health authorities are worried about the misuse of substandard medicines by thieves.

The Sundar police lodged an FIR against 10 unidentified gunmen on the complaint of depot in charge Mudassar Ahmad.

The health department also constituted a four-member committee, headed by additional director Aqib Nazeer, to probe into the incident. The complainant said 10 gunmen entered the government store late night pretending to be the employees of a private company. They held employees and security guards hostage and took away the medicines on a truck. The medicines were stocked there in the form of syrup, injection, tablet and capsule to be 0distributed to public hospitals.

Mudassar said a huge stock of medicines declared substandard was also stolen.

Police were trying to get a CCTV footage in order to trace the culprits and the truck.

A police team constituted to exclusively investigate the case was working on the incident.

Published in Dawn, December 11th, 2019