PESHAWAR, Feb 26: The National Accountability Bureau has started investigations into alleged illegal appointments of schoolteachers by the former education minister and PPP provincial chief, Khwaja Muhammad Khan Hoti, official sources said.

They said the NAB had reopened investigations into the illegal appointments of some 565 teachers of different cadres in Mardan district recruited by the PPP government when Khwaja Muhammad Khan was an education minister in the government of Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao in the NWFP.

Officials said that most of those recruited in violation of rules and the laid-down criteria, including qualification, were later terminated following a departmental inquiry.

A few of those who met the prescribed criteria were allowed to continue their services, the official sources said. According to the sources, the NAB had investigated the case in 2001, but had shelved it for some unknown reasons.

Officials declined to give reason for first shelving the case and then reopening probe into it. "All the relevant record has been retrieved and we are investigating the whole matter again. The inquiry is almost complete and an action is being contemplated," said one official familiar with the development.

The bureau is also investigating the assets of former director of the education department Mohammad Zaman in the same case, the officials said. Mr Zaman was dismissed from his post in early 1999 following a departmental inquiry, conducted by Dr Sher Alam Khan, the former chairman of the NWFP Text Book Board.

Mr Zaman was alleged to have made 1,624 illegal appointments of teachers. The NAB had earlier filed a reference against former provincial minister Habibur Rehman Tanoli for illegal appointments in primary education department.

He was convicted by the accountability court on the grounds that he had put forged signatures of the primary education minister Yousaf Tarand on a letter. However, the Peshawar High Court had set aside his conviction and he was acquitted. Even the accountability court had ruled that those appointments were not illegal.

Officials said NAB was probing links between Hoti and Muhammad Zaman, who is alleged to have made money through illegal recruitment. Khwaja Muhammad Khan Hoti, it may be added, was first an adviser and then made minister for education during the Sherpao government.

He remained associated with Mr Sherpao until the latter parted ways with Benazir Bhutto and formed his own faction of PPP. Mr Hoti quit the PPP (Sherpao) to join Benazir's PPP and became its provincial president.

These sources said that NAB was also looking into other irregularities in the education department, including the presence of ghost schools, self-finance schemes and the mushroom growth of private educational institutions in the NWFP.