BAHAWALNAGAR: The police filed a case against 14 people three days after a lecturer was injured during the attack by another college teacher and his accomplices allegedly over his candidature in the election of the Punjab Professors and Lecturers Association (PPLA).

The FIR filed with the A Division police stated that Mahboob Hussain Shah, a lecturer at the Government Boys Degree College, Bahawalnagar, was attacked on Nov 5 on Eidgah Road when a group of 14 people, including Abdul Rehman Shariq, Osama, Usman, and Badar, attacked him with sticks and kicks when he was returning home from college. The incident was allegedly motivated by Mahboob Hussain Shah’s candidature for general secretary in the PPLA’s divisional-level elections on Nov 22, it said, claiming that Shariq had persuaded him to withdraw from the race but when he refused, he began receiving death threats over WhatsApp and other online platforms. An amount of Rs200,000, ATM cards, and other documents were also stolen. When the police did not file a case for days, the PPLA issued a call for protests, forcing the police to register a case.

A DPO’s spokesperson said the delay in filing the FIR was due to ongoing efforts to achieve a reconciliation between the victim and the perpetrators.Deputy Commissioner Abbas Shah constituted a three-member inquiry committee, headed by the additional deputy commissioner (HQ), to investigate the incident involving a clash among faculty members of the college in Bahawalnagar. The committee’s other members include the Deputy Director Colleges, Bahawalnagar, and the Principal of Government Postgraduate College Bahawalnagar.

Published in Dawn, November 8th, 2026