Prime Minister’s Coordinator for Information on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Affairs and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leader Ikhtiar Wali Khan said on Sunday that those who ruled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for 15 years did nothing for the province, 24NewsHD reported.
Addressing a press conference in Peshawar, Wali said the same people used to claim that they were going to build a “new KP”, but had nothing to show for their years in power.
Wali claimed that 80 per cent of the gold excavated in the province was smuggled to Afghanistan. He said as many as 2,000 excavators were operational in Kohat, and added that the money generated from illegal mining was used against the state.
He further claimed that the PTI government had given five-to-10-year leases for illegal mining. Those involved in the practice would now be taken to task, he said.
The remarks came a day after Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Faisal Karim Kundi announced the cancellation of all gold mining leases in the province and the suspension of mining activities, directing leaseholders and contractors to remove their heavy machinery from the affected areas within a week.
The crackdown followed an ambush on 11 November, when a police party travelling to raid an illegal gold mining network near Darbokach, in the riverine belt between Kohat and Karak, was attacked as it returned.
Governor Kundi had said at his own press conference in Peshawar on 14 November that the illegal extraction was producing about Rs4.2 billion worth of gold a month, and that a single mining block had been leased for Rs4.92 billion over ten years, according to reports of the announcement.
The figures and allegations raised by Wali are his claims, as reported by 24NewsHD, and have not been independently verified. The report did not carry a response from the PTI.
The PTI has governed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since 2013. Wali, as the prime minister’s coordinator for the province, is a PML-N appointee, and his press conference is the latest in a series of exchanges between the federal government and the PTI-led provincial government over the province’s mineral resources.
