KARACHI, Feb 10: The President, Pervez Musharraf, has ordered the removal of Aziz Bhatti Shaheed police station and residential quarters on the encroached land belonging to the Export Promotion Bureau.
"The president gave this order three months ago," Tariq Ikram, the state minister and chairman of the Export Promotion Bureau, told Dawn on Thursday. He, however, said the EPB wanted to have a modern and model police station that would serve foreign investors and businessmen, who come to Pakistan to attend business events like the recently held 'Expo 2005' at the Expo Centre built by the EPB on the land.
"We haven't been conveyed any information about the removal of the Aziz Bhatti Shaheed police station," the Sindh home secretary responded to a query of Dawn. He, however, appreciated the idea of having a plushy and good-looking building for the police station.
The police occupied the 57-acre prized plot in Gulshan-i-Iqbal, allotted to the Export Promotion Bureau, in 1984 after a trade fair organised by the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry ended up in a scam, and the chambers failed to pay a bill of Rs4.7 million to the Karachi Development Authority.
The then martial law administrator Lt-Gen (Retd) Jehandad Khan issued a directive to the area sub-divisional magistrate, who issued a three line order to cancel the EPB allotment.
After taking over, the police stole away the expensive fixtures of the trade fair. It built a police station and floated a fake Gilani Housing Society. Residential plots were sold away to fellow policemen.
In 1990, Faisal Saleh Hayat, the then commerce minister in the Benazir government offered 10 per cent (5.7 acres) of the 57-acre plot to the Sindh police and asked it to vacate the rest.
Then in 1993, Nawaz Sharif, the then prime minister offered the Sindh police Rs15 million to vacate the plot and find another place. The police took the ransom money but did not vacate the plot.
It was eventually in 1997 when the police was finally forced to vacate the plot, but only after retaining part of it, where it now has a shabbily constructed structure housing the police station. The police also constructed residential houses on the premises.
It took the EPB more than 14 years to get its allotted plot back after pleading its case in the meetings of the Federal Export Promotion Board, Economic Coordination Committee and even in federal cabinet meetings.
Three international trade fairs were organised on the land in the early sixties, and it was in one of such fairs in December 1963 that a policeman went berserk and opened fire killing seven persons including a pregnant woman.
After the incident, which then cast a pall of gloom over the city, no international trade fair was held.
In 1984, a private-sector initiative proved to be a scam. No office bearer of the FPCCI was punished. Only a few employees of the chambers were thrown out of jobs.
The EPB has also constructed an Expo Centre on this plot, where a few exhibitions of international standard have already been held. These fairs have attracted large numbers of people.
The bureau now plans to construct a five star hotel, two more spacious halls, a modern auditorium with a capacity of 1,000 people, and two overhead access and exit roads that would link the Expo centre directly with the main road.