KOHAT: The local traders have urged the administration to expel Afghan vendors from Miankhel, main bazaars and wholesale grocery market.

Speaking at a jirga on Thursday, the chairman of Grand Businessmen Alliance, Haji Abid Khan said that Afghan refugees occupied shops in the bazaars at high rents of Rs60,000 to Rs70,000 per month, making it difficult for local traders to get a shop.

He said that they were also running real estate businesses besides dealing in fruits and vegetables. He said that Afghan owners of pushcarts bought vegetables and fruits at high rates and sold the same to customers at the encroached upon areas on roads for which they had to pay no charges of electricity or rent.

JAILED: The additional sessions judge VII, Shamsul Huda, sentenced a drug smuggler to 16 years imprisonment and imposed a fine of Rs1 million on him here on Thursday.

SP Jameelur Rehman told journalists that Fazalud Din, a resident of Kurram district, was arrested by Jarma police with three kilograms of hashish and ice drug.

Meanwhile, parents of 365 students of primary school Boraka have announced not to send their children to school after several of them fainted due to sitting in the scorching heat under the open sky in the absence of classrooms.

They said that they had been promised by city mayor Qari Sher Zaman and deputy commissioner Dr Azamatullah Wazir that rooms would be constructed in the high school during the summer vacations. “But not a brick had been placed during the vacations,” they said. They said that their children had to follow the old routine of attendance by half of the students for three days a week.

Malik Tariq, the chief of local peace committee in Boraka, said that the sub-divisional education officer asked them not to stop sending their children to school. He said that education department demolished two classrooms on the ground floor and two on the first floor of the school for reconstruction.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2023