‘Son of donkey’: Sub-inspector calls it a day ‘due to CCPO’s behaviour’

ISLAMABAD: A police sub-inspector has resigned from his position alleging that the Lahore Capital City Police Officer (CCPO) Umar Sheikh abused him in a meeting. Fahad Iftikhar Virk stated in his two-line resignation letter, a copy of which is available with The News, that he is unable to serve in the police department any more. When contacted, Virk told this correspondent that when he was answering a question in a meeting chaired by the CCPO on September 22, Sheikh called him the “son of a donkey”. He said he felt deeply insulted and immediately handed in his resignation after that episode.

Virk said he was in-charge of the media monitoring cell and in that capacity, was briefing Sheikh and other officers. “The CCPO asked me a question that I answered. While I was replying, he interrupted and dubbed me a ‘son of a donkey,’ saying that he was asking me something but was getting an answer to something else.”

Virk said he belongs to a respectable, educated family and that his father was a schoolteacher. He said since March this year, he has been working on the web pages of the CCPO and other senior officers of the Lahore police. Whatever one can see on these pages today, he said, is because of his efforts that have been appreciated by his seniors in the past.

Virk said that he completed his M Phil in environmental chemistry from the United States in 2015. He said serving in the police had always been his passion and that is why he appeared in the competitive examination of the Punjab Public Service Commission and was placed at number 10 on the merit list.

He said he quit because his personal dignity was severely attacked. “I was asked to get out of the meeting, which I had to do, but later wrote out my resignation to the senior superintendent of police (SSP), Lahore.”

Meanwhile, a reader of the deputy superintendent of police (DSP), Baghbanpura Circle, Lahore, has written a three-page letter, a copy of which is available with The News, to the Inspector General Police (IGP) Punjab to order an impartial inquiry into the registration of a case against him and another police official on the orders of the CCPO.

He requested that the inquiry should not be conducted by any subordinate of the CCPO otherwise it would not be impartial and fair as all the officers of Lahore are under the CCPO. The case had been registered against Reader Syed Zaigham Abbas and the DSP’s gunman Mohammad Yousuf.

Abbas claimed that Yousuf received a call from the CCPO’s telephone operator Saeed, who asked him to connect him to the DSP. He was told that the DSP was praying at the time.

Yousuf was told that someone was sitting in the Circle office and was not being allowed by the reader to meet the DSP. The operator was informed that nobody was waiting there for a meeting.

Eventually, the CCPO talked to the DSP after the latter had finished praying and asked him to come to his office along with Abbas and Yousuf. Abbas claimed that when they got there, he and Yousuf had to face a barrage of very harsh language from the CCPO who ordered the DSP to register a criminal case against them.

The CCPO office sources said the city police chief has been in the line of fire ever since he assumed the office. They said the allegations against the CCPO were distortion of facts, and he would not shy away from any inquiry.