KARACHI: Police have claimed to have eliminated criminal elements from various Katcha areas of Ghotki following a joint operation with Rangers.
SSP Anwar Khitran stated that the operation was launched after 14 passengers were abducted.
According to him, security forces successfully cleared Katcha Rajwani, Katcha Umrani, and Katcha Karachi, ending the presence of bandits in these regions.
SSP Anwar Khitran added that after the operation, the cleared areas of the Katcha region have been handed over to Southern Punjab.
A bomb disposal squad has been called in to recover weapons and explosives from destroyed bunkers, as there is a risk of unexploded rockets detonating.
He claimed that such a large cache of weapons was recovered that it may not have been seen even in areas like Wana or Waziristan.
It is worth noting that a few days earlier, bandits had kidnapped passengers from a bus and taken them into the Katcha areas.
Meanwhile the security forces have claimed that 20 havens of the robbers have been destroyed completely during the operations.
According to the police sources, 9 wanted robbers have been killed during the operations.
It is worth mentioning that the robber-gangs across the Southern Punjab and the Upper Sindh areas possess deadly weapons and have carried out various ‘kidnapping for ransom’ crimes in the past many years.
Although, the security forces have launched many operations in the past many years, however, the gangs are wide-spread in the Katcha areas of Sindh and Punjab and they relocate themselves in the nearby residential areas whenever large-scale operations by forces are carried out.
The Bandits have kindnapped hundreds of civilians and they often release videos of brutal torture in order to force the families of the victims to pay hefy amount for ransom.
The matter of bandits operating fearlessly has become a serious concern for the state and the law-enforcement agencies in the past two decades.
The civilians have demanded to take harsh measures and eliminate all such gangs once and for all.
