PESHAWAR, July 6: Dozens of teenaged boys frequenting internet cafes have been rounded up, chained and produced before magistrates in the last two weeks on alleged charges of watching pornography , as part of a drive against obscenity launched by the police department.

Police have been conducting repeated raids on internet cafes. According to one senior police official, this is part of the drive to weed out 'obscenity.' But critics say that given the lack of computer literacy among policemen in the NWFP, they would be the last people to know anything about computer or internet.

The SSP, Peshawar, Abid Ali, who is spearheading the campaign and who, by his own admission, does not know the ABCs of the internet, said that internet cafes downloaded X-rated pornographic files for youngsters to watch.

"I don't know anything about internet. I never used computer internet but there are people in our department who are competent at handling computers. They have the know-how in computers," he told Dawn while defending the police action in the city.

Internet cafe owners defending their business practices said that their computer monitors were positioned in a manner that they were visible to all patrons and so it was impossible for any user to watch pornographic material all alone in his own cubicle.

Also, argue computer experts, any website seen is automatically saved in its history page and unless it is deleted any user using the computer could not be charged for an act that might have been committed by a previous user.

The police have its poor track record of handling computer-related crimes. Wrote a police official in his roznamcha, daily diary, that the offensive letter that had gotten into a newspaper, was found on a "Sarwar Na'mee Computer" (a computer named Sarwar). The poor chap was referring to a computer server.

The case officer, at the time a DIG of the Crimes Branch, was computer illiterate and an SSP, who was computer savvy, had to tutor him on the use of email and internet.

But SSP Abid Ali denied the police was using the campaign to harass internet cafes. He said that the raids were being conducted by police accompanied by officers of the ranks of the SPs and DSPs.

In his opinion, the misuse of internet to watch pornographic material was widespread and there had been complaints. But when asked why did the police bring teenaged boys handcuffed to the courts in violation of the law that prohibits the use of chains for certain age, the SSP promised to look into it. Asked whether this was part of the MMA government agenda to eradicate 'obscenity', Abid Ali said the drive was the police's own initiative.