PESHAWAR, May 23: A federal drug inspector in the city is receiving death threats after he helped the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to conduct a raid on a market and confiscate thousands of forged educational certificates and passports last week.

Inspector Noor Mohammad Shah had detected illegal activities at office number 20 of the Fayyaz Medicines Market in Namak Mandi last Thursday afternoon during a routine inspection by his team, official sources confirmed to Dawn on Tuesday.

Mr Shah informed the FIA officials who raided the place and seized thousands of fake educational certificates, Pakistani and Afghani passports, bogus official documents and stamps from the office of Faiz-ur-Rehman alias Papu Khan.

However, FIA officials claimed that the office had been locked when they conducted the raid.

After the seizure of four large sacks of forged official documents, some unknown persons hurled death threats against the federal drug inspector on the telephone, official sources confirmed.

Mr Shah informed the acting FIA director Shaukat Hayat about these threats and asked for security guards, these sources said.

However, a senior officer, who requested not to be named, refuted the federal drug inspector’s claim of life threats. “In fact, the FIA crime circle had a plan to raid the office at 5:30 pm when accused Faiz-ur-Rehman was to meet his accomplices there,” he said.

On the one hand, he said, he helped the FIA, but on the other hand he spoiled their plan to arrest the accused red-handed.

“I have been kidnapped by criminals twice and attacked with firearms for detecting illegal activities in my career. And all the time God saved me,” said Noor Mohammad Shah.

“I was on routine check of the medicine market last Thursday when I heard some people talking about forged passports,” Mr Shah said. “I forced the two persons inside the room to open the door, where some important but forged documents were scattered around the table,” he added.

He immediately informed the FIA crime branch about the forged documents and asked them to rush to the spot as he and his unarmed team members could not detain him for a long time, according to the federal drug inspector.

When the FIA team came to the spot, he handed over one of the accused and later started checking medicines in the Fayyaz Market, he said.

But the next day, the FIA official claimed that they had seized the documents on prior information about illegal activities in Fayyaz Market.

“I don’t know how the person I had handed over to the FIA escaped,” the federal drug inspector said.

That person was an informer, not the accused, the FIA official claimed.

The FIA crime circle charged Faiz-ur-Rehman alias Papu and his accomplice Farmanullah in a case. But both of them secured bail before arrest.

Acting FIA Director Shaukat Hayat was contacted several times for his comment on the actual position, but he was not available.

However, sources in the FIA told Dawn that the two accused Faiz-ur-Rehman and Farmanullah came to the FIA regional office on Monday and Tuesday for the purpose of a patch-up on the issue.