KARACHI, Jan 12: The illegal inter-city bus stands behind Hamdard Medical Hospital in Lines Area, Saddar that were removed by the Karachi Cantonment Board administration with the help of the police on Wednesday morning, reappeared on Friday.

The police impounded 40 buses in the operation against the illegal intercity bus terminus in Lines Area.

During the campaign, the police also removed pushcarts and other encroachments on the pavement and the roads right from Hamdard Medical Hospital to Rainbow Centre.

After the operation, the intercity bus operators lodged a protest and held a press conference the same day terming the operation an injustice. The bus operators said that they had paid a fee for parking their buses in the area to the cantonment board.

The operators said they had warned the cantonment officials of legal action if they were stopped from parking their vehicles. They also claimed that the government had promised them a proper operational bus depot on the outskirts of the city before closing the illegal terminal.

After the bus operators’ press conference and threats to the administration, the Karachi Cantonment Board officials seemed to have softened their earlier aggressive stance taken on Wednesday. Consequently, the intercity bus operators reappeared and parked their large buses in the same area within 48 hours.

The police when contacted said they were unaware the buses had reappeared and parked in the area. They said they had taken the action on the instructions of the cantonment board and if it had allowed them to park buses, the police could do nothing as it was the jurisdiction of the cantonment board. No version was available from the cantonment board as no official could be contacted.

The city government which is supposed to have an inter-city bus depot operational on the Super Highway has been unable to do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is some of the land earmarked for the depots was in the use of the rangers. However, a spokesman for the rangers said they had vacated half of the plot earmarked for the Gulistan-i-Jauhar bus depot and handed it over to the government. He said the rangers had requested the Sindh government to allocate land to them for the agency’s use.

Meanwhile, the sufferers as always are the citizens and residents who say reappearance of intercity buses will return them to the miserable conditions they were living in before