Crimes rising in Peshawar

THE FRONTIER POST

Peshawarites have been feeling the brunt of terror attacks for the last few years. Weather it was the dreadful and horrific blast of Pippal Mandi or it was attack on public buildings like ISI building near R.A. Bazar or Sunday's attack by the militants on Bacha Khan International Airport much has been written and talked about these incidents and will carry on to be written and talked in future as well. Policemen of Peshawar has always stood like iron wall in front of the terrorists without caring for their own lives and a large number of cops have embraced martyrdom in such attacks. However, if we read newspapers of City whether Urdu or English, we will find that another issue that is being faced by Peshawarites and people living in the suburbs of provincial capital. This issue is the increasing number of crimes in the city. Even our crime reporter files three to four murder news every week. This means, if on average four people die in Peshawar and its suburbs every week then around 28 to 30 people die every month and around 330 people die every year. Similarly, the incidents of theft, robbery and other crimes are also on the rise. Some news reports a few months back in section of press had blamed presence of unregistered motorcycles for the increase in crime rates in Peshawar. However, people like me do not care what the cause of the rising crimes is. My concern is if every week four people die at the hands of unidentified, as the murderers hardly had been identified, where is the government who is responsible for safeguarding people's lives. No doubt both security forces and the government has done considerably good job in bring the life back to normalcy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa especially in Peshawar after a wave of terrorism attacks had hit the provincial capital back in 2009-10 and later. To stop a suicide bomber from exploding the jacket wrapped around his body is almost impossible for even the countries like USA whose security forces are equipped with the best weapons in the world. But stopping the street crimes and rising number of murder incidents is in the hands of the authorities. A few months back Chief Justice Peshawar High Court Justice Dost Muhammad had to jump in to ask the authorities about the messages being sent on mobile phones regarding group of criminals raiding different villages of Peshawar which had created panic among people of Peshawar. CJ Dost then directed the police officials to take steps to stop such rumours as it was done only to delay elections. There was no comment on the issue from any of the ministers of government officials. I am covering the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly from the last three years and hardly any of the 124 legislators has ever spoken of increasing number of crimes in Peshawar. It is the time we should start thinking of stopping the rising number of crimes in Peshawar otherwise the day will not be far when we can see the killings like that in Karachi and Balochistan.