SARGODHA: In the ongoing crackdown against criminal elements, police claimed on Tuesday to have arrested 156 declared and habitual criminals.

Police claimed that the arrested criminals include 11 category A criminals, 72 category B criminals and 73 habitual criminals involved in serious crimes.

District Police Officer (DPO) Muhammad Sohaib Ashraf expressed his determination that the crackdown against criminals would continue until the district was free from crime.

Meanwhile, police also claimed to have arrested a two-member gang of thieves and recovered stolen goods worth hundreds of thousands of rupees from them.

According to the police, the Mela Police arrested Imran and Matiullah and recovered stolen solar and electric motors worth more than Rs300,000 from them.

MEAT SEIZED: The Punjab Food Authority (PFA) claimed to have seized and destroyed 800kg of unsafe meat from a vehicle supplying meat of diseased animals.

PFA said that a food safety team had set up a checkpoint in Kot Momin and destroyed 800kg of unhygienic meat from a vehicle supplying meat of sick animals to hotels.

The Kot Momin police impounded the vehicle used to supply the meat and were busy investigating.

PFA officials said that operations against selling unhygienic meat were underway in the district.

WOMEN VOTERS: District Election Commissioner Arshad Ali, while emphasising on reducing the gap between male and female voters and making voter awareness campaigns effective, said that there was a need for a comprehensive and systematic awareness campaign in the district to increase the registration of women voters.

He said this during a meeting on Tuesday. The meeting considered the data recently provided by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), on which the Nadra assistant director assured that potential hotspots would be included in the upcoming mobile registration vans (MRVs) project to make the registration process more effective.

The Sargodha district election commissioner asked the members to provide concrete and actionable data related to their respective communities in the next meeting so that a joint and integrated strategy could be formulated to resolve the problems of voter registration.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2026