KARACHI: A senior government official has disappeared mysteriously in the city, officials said on Saturday.

Sindh Human Rights secretary Badar Jamil Mandhro, who is reportedly facing a corruption case, had left his house in Clifton in the morning for his office at the Sindh Secretariat.

DIG South Sharjeel Kharal told Dawn that Mr Mandhro reportedly made telephone contact with his wife at around 2.30am — the night between Friday and Saturday — and told her that he was in Defence Housing Authority.

The DIG said that police came to know about his disappearance on Saturday and they used technology to trace him. His mobile phone was traced to Nazimabad and it was switched off there at around 4am, he added.

He said the police were waiting for the family to formally lodge a report to proceed further.

He said that the family had not received any ransom call.

Inspector General of Police Dr Syed Kaleem Imam took notice of the disappearance of Mr Mandhro, who is a grade 21 officer, and directed the DIGs of the three zones of police to look into this matter and submit a report to him.

He also assigned the matter as a special task to the DIG CIA.

Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah also took notice of the incident and sought a report from the IGP, chairman of the Anti-Corruption Establishment (ACE) and other institutions.

“If he has been kidnapped, concerted efforts should be made to recover him,” the CM said, adding that if any organisation had detained the secretary, his arrest should be made public.

A source at the CM House said that the ACE submitted a report to Mr Shah stating that it did not arrest the provincial secretary.

Mr Mandhro is accused of embezzlement of funds meant for uplift schemes of the Karachi Development Authority (KDA) of which he was the director general until recently.

ACE officials had told media that the provincial secretary already got pre-arrest bail from an anti-corruption court in the funds’ embezzlement case.

A source in the National Accountability Bureau said that Mr Mandhro was previously arrested by NAB on charges of illegal recruitments in the Sindh minorities department when he was the department’s secretary some years ago.

However, the NAB source said that when they filed a reference against him, he moved an application before an accountability court under Section 265-K of the Criminal Procedure Code pleading that he had no role in such illegal recruitments. Subsequently, the court had acquitted him.

The NAB source said that he did not know if there was any inquiry pending against the senior bureaucrat for allegedly possessing assets beyond known source of income.

Published in Dawn, January 12th, 2020