KARACHI, July 10: The government on Tuesday appointed Fayyaz Ahmed Leghari Sindh IG police just four days after he had been booked by the Islamabad police for providing false evidence over dual nationality of a legislator to the Supreme Court as chief of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA).

Experiencing quite a bumpy professional career mainly for the past five years, Mr Leghari is set to assume charge of the office from where he was removed in June 2011 on a Supreme Court order.

The Supreme Court had ordered the removal of the then Sindh police chief Fayyaz Leghari along with the then Sindh Rangers DG Major General Aijaz Chaudhary, who was later promoted and posted as a corps commander, while hearing the case of Sarfaraz Shah who was killed by paramilitary soldiers at point-blank range in Shaheed Benazir Bhutto Park, Clifton.

While Mr Leghari did not have any remarkable achievement that he could boast of during his over-three-decade service in the police, his career history shows that the 57-year-old officer has managed to win trust of the authorities in almost every political government and even during the rule of a military dictator.

After joining the civil service in 1979, his services were transferred to the Sindh police and as a law-enforcer he first took charge of ASP headquarters in Karachi in 1981, said a handout released by the central police office with personal and professional details of the new Sindh IG.

From 1981 to 1994, he served in the Sindh police and rose to SSP rank when he was transferred to Punjab for merely a month and then his service was placed at the disposal of the Sindh government. He staged a comeback in the Sindh police in 1997 to stay in the department till 2005 when his alleged links with Shoaib Khan surfaced only in the media.

Khan, nucleus of the city’s first-ever recognised underworld, died in mysterious circumstances in January 2005 in the Karachi Central Prison, days after he was arrested from Lahore.

Khan had said to be enjoying backing of several police officers and the investigators during the course of their probe had seized a video film substantiating such a theory. But such allegations never moved beyond media reports.

After being penalised by the Supreme Court in 2011, Mr Leghari was appointed FIA chief but again he could not escape the apex court’s ire. Only last week he along with his FIA colleagues were nominated in the FIR under Sections 192 (fabricating false evidence), 193 (punishment for false evidence) and 197 (issuing or signing false certificates) of the Pakistan Penal Code by the Islamabad’s Secretariat police.

A three-member SC bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry ordered its additional registrar to lodge a complaint against the DG FIA and other officers for providing misleading information to the court showing Tariq Mahmood Alloana, a PPP lawmaker elected from Mandi Bahauddin, as a US citizen.