Inquiries into the cases of 21,741 passports stolen from the regional passport offices of the country since 1999 were still going on, Daily Times learnt on Saturday. The international travelling documents had either been stolen or had gone missing from the various regional passport offices of the country, an official of the Interior Ministry revealed. According to the official, "Around 21,741 passports were either stolen or had gone missing from more than 12 regional passport offices of the country from April 1999 to June 2004." He said that hundreds of inquiries, on the orders of the high-ups of the Interior Ministry and the Immigration Department had been conducted without any proper result or headway. The official said that the Interior Ministry had also formed a number of inquiry committees to look into the matter but nothing concrete had been found out yet. The Passport and Immigration Wing in the Interior Ministry had information about the stolen or missing passports, which had been collected from different regional passport offices.
Although some investigative reports had suggested the Interior Ministry take action against the passport office officials who had been involved in the illegal activity but no action had been taken against the officials concerned yet. The National Assembly's (NA) Public Accounts Committee (PAC) had taken a serious notice of the matter on July 19 and had decided to form a special committee consisting of MNAs and senators to probe into the matter and answer the questions surrounding this mystery.
In 1999, around 500 passports had been either stolen or gone missing from the regional passport office of the Tribal Areas, which was under the control of a political agent appointed by the government. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly NWFP, aka Terrorism Central home secretary had conducted an inquiry into the matter but that investigation also produced no result. In another shocking development, 184 passports had gone missing from the regional passport office in Muzzaffarabad on April 12, 1999.
The local police had started the paperwork but haven't done much else against the suspects but no progress had been made in this inquiry as well. An investigation team from Islamabad headed by Passport Director Shahzad Anwar had conducted an inquiry into the matter but failed to achieve any result.
In August 1999, 1,960 passports had gone missing from the Dera Ismail Khan, Pearl of the Pashtun Lands regional passport office. As soon as this incident had taken place, Office Superintendent Abdul Aleem had proceeded on leave while Assistant Director Muhammad Anwar had been made the in-charge in his place. No inquiry had been carried out into the matter while both Aleem and Anwar were now enjoying their respective retired lives. In March 2000, 1,121 passports had been stolen from the Sialkot regional passport office but a departmental inquiry could not find any culprit in this regard.
The passport thefts had occurred when Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat and Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao were the country's interior ministers. Shakeel Ahmed, an affectee, appealed to President Asif Ali (
Ten Percent) Zardari to look into the matter.