Fact-check: Was 400 tonnes of sugar recovered from Ali Gandapur’s warehouse?
Three officials in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa deny that any such recovery has been made from a warehouse owned by the former federal minister
Updated Monday Oct 02 2023
Posts viewed hundreds of times on social media falsely claim that law enforcement agencies have seized over 400 tonnes of sugar from a warehouse owned by Ali Amin Gandapur, a former federal minister and a senior leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI).
The claim is baseless.
Claim
“It should be a moment of pause for the PTI that 438 tonnes of sugar was recovered from the warehouse of Ali Amin,” wrote one Facebook user on September 10, “Is this not the same as being the enemy of the state?”
The post had been liked over 500 times and shared over 1,000 times, at the time of writing.
The text has also been shared by other Facebook users here and here.
Fact
Officials from the food department in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the district food office, and the tehsil administration in Dera Ismail Khan deny that any such recovery has been made from a warehouse owned by the former federal minister.
Riaz Ghafur, the spokesperson to the minister for food in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which is tasked with ensuring smooth distribution of food grains in the province, told Geo Fact Check over the phone that the claims were false.
“The concerned official from the directorate general food in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has confirmed that [the allegations] are fake,” he said.
Nazir-ur-Rahman, the district food controller in Dera Ismail Khan, also said that he was not aware of bulk sugar being seized from a warehouse owned by Gandapur.
“This is not in our notice,” Rahman told Geo Fact Check over the phone, “We have otherwise recovered 8,365 bags of sugar from different places, not from a single place.”
Geo Fact Check then reached out to Farhan Ahmed, the assistant commissioner in Dera Ismail Khan, who also denied he was aware of any such raid or sugar being seized from the warehouse owned by the PTI leader.
With additional reporting by Muhammad Binyameen Iqbal
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