KARACHI, March 22: As a probe into Thursday’s mysterious blaze in the Sindh Board of Revenue’s office continued on Saturday, sources in the provincial administration and officials disclosed that a project aimed at the computerisation of records of lands worth billions of rupees was scrapped in 2005 a few months after it had been initiated following a dispute within the then ruling coalition.

The disclosure appears to strengthen the suspicion of police detectives who said they had reason to believe that arson was responsible for Thursday’s blaze and sent the samples of destroyed documents to a chemical laboratory to establish the fire’s cause.

“In 2005, a private company was assigned the task of computerising the land record across the province and undertaking a survey of Karachi city,” said a source close to the investigation team and the politicians then at the helm of affairs in Sindh.“The then administration took up three major initiatives: computerisation of record, regularization of villages and hamlets across Sindh and a survey of Karachi, which included ongoing allotment of lands and their terms of reference.”

He recalled that the project failed to take off when a rift erupted between the then chief minister and his minister for revenue, which led to the cancellation of the project and reversal of several initiatives taken by the ministry.

Echoing the same views, the then minister for revenue, Imtiaz Sheikh, told Dawn that his political rivalry with former Sindh chief minister Dr Arbab Ghulam Rahim had dealt a bitter blow to several projects being pursued by his ministry.

However, he said he did not know who among the province’s administration pulled the plug on the automation of Karachi surveys and computerisation of the land record after he was removed from the ministry.

Meanwhile, the probe into the Board of Revenue fire became more complex when it emerged on Saturday that the Sindh government had also constituted an independent inquiry committee believing that the scope of the police investigation would be limited. The new inquiry team was apparently established at the orders of chief minister.

It is worth noting that the Sindh governor has already set up an inquiry committee to investigate reasons behind rising fire incidents in the city. The committee will take up the issue next week.

“We have preserved the incident site and there is no movement around that area,” said Akhtar Hussain Memon, DIG (Investigations), who is heading the three-member police investigation team.

“We have collected samples from the spot and sent it to the chemical laboratory to find out the nature of the fire. It would help us find out the reasons behind it. It would not be proper to comment on the fire before we have the chemical report,” he said.

However, a senior Sindh government official said the police investigation should only focus on security measures in their course of inquiry, adding that they were not supposed to find out the reasons [of the fire] without approval from the provincial authorities.

“That’s why the caretaker chief minister himself ordered an inquiry into the incident and the chief secretary is set to nominate officials in that inquiry committee,” said the official. “In such a situation, the scope of a police investigation becomes limited unless we ask them to assist the Sindh government.”