A polio worker and her husband were arrested in Bhakkar on Wednesday after police discovered that they had wrongly accused two men of attacking her.
The men, who had been arrested after she filed a complaint, have been released.
Police said investigation had revealed that the polio worker had staged “the attack” to implicate them in a false case. They said she and her husband had had a dispute with the two men.
Behal Station House Officer Afzal Khan said Shaheen Rani had called them on their helpline in the morning saying that she had been attacked by two men, she identified as arrested Ghafoor Ahmed and Muhammad Sikandar, while she was immunising children. She claimed that the men dragged her out of the official van and beat her. She said her husband, a driver at the Health Department, was driving the van. She said he, too, was beaten when he tried to stop the men.
The SHO said that police visited the scene, but were told that the men had fled. They were later arrested from Chak 80-ML. He said two other men, believed to be their accomplices, were also arrested.
However, he said, investigations revealed that “the attack” was staged and that the polio worker had not been “on duty” in the area. She, he said, instead should have been in Hussainabad, where she was assigned polio duty.
The polio drive was limited to the Dhandhla and Hussainabad union councils on Wednesday.
He said the investigation had revealed that Sikandar had filed an FIR against Rani and her husband for defrauding people by promising to sending them abroad. He said the police discovered that the case under investigation.
The SHO submitted a report to District Police Officer Sarfraz Falki, who directed the police to arrest the couple. The SHO said that the two men were released shortly before Rani and her husband were arrested on charges of falsifying evidence, wrongly implicating innocent men in a case, lying to police and campaigning terror and maligning the anti polio campaign in the district. He said they had both confessed to the charges.
Health EDO Javed Ashraf has made District Officer Akram Mubarak in charge of the inquiry. The DO will submit his report on Thursday (today) to the EDO and the district coordination officer, Mumtaz Hussain Zahid.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 23rd, 2014.