JHANG, Oct 18: Jhangar Gilhotran, the notorious hideout of inter-district gangs of cattle-lifters and traffickers of illicit arms, has been cleaned up.

DPO Khadim Hussain Bhatti said the police had conducted a grand operation against the criminals for a couple of days with the help of hundreds of selected personnel from police, elite force and the Punjab Constabulary.

He said that not only a good number of cattle-lifters and their influential harbourers were arrested but a large number of stolen cattle-head and sizable illicit arms were also recovered from the area.

Jhangar Gilhotran is spread over an area of 30,000 acres of land on both sides of river Chenab along the Chiniot-Pindi Bhattian Road on the eastern bank in the limits of Chiniot Saddar and Chenab Nagar police stations on the western bank.

For its peculiar geographical approach, the area is almost inaccessible to outsiders in the absence of any central village. The population lives in 150 hamlets, dotting along the river and its branches.

To approach each hamlet, one has to cross two rivers on foot or horseback for the area is unmotorable.

Since the turn of the twentieth century, the area had been the breeding grounds for gangsters and cattle-lifters of Jhang, Faisalabad, Gujranwala (now Hafizabad) and Sargodha districts.

The British had established a check post in the area to control crime, but without yielding any concrete result.

The Jhangar Gilhotran area again came into limelight a few years ago when a joint raiding team of Faisalabad and Jhang police had to face an uphill task in recovering two girls abducted from Chak Jhumra area, Faisalabad district.

The Punjab chief minister had directed DIGs of Faisalabad, Gujranwala and Sargodha to wipe out the safe havens of criminals alongside the river Chenab on its both banks from Qadirabad Head-works upstream to Garh Maharaja downstream with particular focus on Jhangar Gilhotran area.

A meeting of three DIGs and DPOs of Jhang, Hafizabad and Sargodha was held in Faisalabad to evolve a strategy during operations in their respective areas.

The Jhang police selected 37 hamlets in the Jhangar area on the basis of information supplied by various secret missions sent there from time to time.

Three hundred officers and jawans of the Jhang police, led by the Chiniot ASP, besieged the area from different directions to arrest the criminals.

The outcome was a tremendous success as the police recovered 834 cattle-heads and arrested 67 cattle-lifters, all of whom were proclaimed offenders. Police also arrested 13 influential people of the area, who used to provide shelter to the arrested criminals. However, the DPO did not disclose their names.

The police also retrieved two Kalashnikovs, 58 guns of 12 bore, 21 rifles, 89 pistols, 30 revolvers, 11 carbines and 511 cartridges besides taking into custody 1.6kg heroin, 35kg hashish and 589 bottles of liquor.

In addition, the police arrested 122 proclaimed offenders and 57 court absconders from the area.