KARACHI: Five Karachi University (KU) employees were taken into custody by the Rangers in a raid on Friday morning when most students and teachers were busy in the rehearsal of a convocation being held on Saturday (today) on the campus.

Sources said the non-teaching staff were associated with the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) or its students’ wing, All-Pakistan Muttahida Students Organisation (APMSO). They were identified as Zohaib (accounts officer), Rehan (accountant), Naveed Siddiqi (audit officer), Zeeshan Amin (junior accounts clerk) and Shamshad Alam (library clerk), all were present in one building at the time of the raid.

At around 11.30am, Rangers personnel, some of them masked, cordoned off the two buildings of the administration block and left within an hour or so after taking the ‘wanted men’ into custody.

“All the gates were closed and nobody was allowed to enter or leave the buildings. The masked personnel were the ones who identified the staff in the old administration building and took them away,” said a KU official who was present at the time of the raid.

Rumours are circulating on the campus that the ‘arrest’ of the five staffers was linked to the ‘detention’ of a KU assistant registrar who had been picked up by a law enforcement agency three days ago. It is speculated that he provided the information about the ‘wanted men’ on the campus.

Also there are speculations that some of the detained men used to spend time with Mohsin Ali, one of the key accused in Dr Imran Farooq’s murder case.

When contacted, KU campus security adviser Prof Khalid Iraqi said: “I contacted the Rangers wing commander on the campus while the operation was in progress but he was not aware of the raid. The fact that the Rangers’ officials didn’t take any document indicates that they just wanted to take certain people with them. We are expecting that the staff will either be released or produced in court by Monday.”

In reply to a question, he said it’s the first raid by the Rangers on the university’s administration block. “Previously, some non-teaching staff members, including Zeeshan Amin, had been picked up four to five months ago from the university’s residential area.”

The security adviser also confirmed to Dawn about the “absence of assistant registrar Shehzad Abdullah” and said: “His family hasn’t contacted us yet. We’ve read in a newspaper that he was picked up by a law enforcement agency in the Gulistan-i-Jauhar area three days ago.”

Published in Dawn, April 16th, 2016