Islamabad authorities moved on Friday evening to take back five commercial plazas in Mouza Malpur along Murree Road, in the latest step of a campaign to recover state land that officials say has been occupied unlawfully for around twenty years. The operation was carried out jointly by the Islamabad Capital Territory administration, the Capital Development Authority’s enforcement arm and Islamabad Police, and it forms part of a wider effort to reclaim 108 kanals of government land in the area.
According to officials, a survey of the disputed land turned up a much larger footprint than the five plazas alone, with two fuel stations, nine commercial plazas in total, twenty-five houses and two warehouses identified on the ground. The scale of that survey explains why the authorities are treating this as a continuing campaign rather than a single evening’s action, and why further properties in the same locality may come under scrutiny as revenue records are checked one by one.
The drive follows a direct instruction from Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, who asked Islamabad’s chief commissioner and Capital Development Authority Chairman Sohail Ashraf to enforce anti-encroachment laws evenly and without exception. A review of revenue records then raised questions about the paperwork behind some of the occupation, with officials saying that documents linked to different khasra numbers in the neighbouring Mouza Kot Hathial had been used to support claims over land in Mouza Malpur. In some cases examined at a document verification camp, sale deeds were said to describe plots roughly one and a half kilometres away from the properties actually occupied.
That gap between paper and ground is now at the heart of the legal side of the operation. Authorities are preparing proceedings, including first information reports over alleged fraudulent land transactions, and officials pointed to the commercial value at stake by noting that one of the plazas had reportedly changed hands for five crore rupees only five months ago. For the people living and trading in the area, the message is that long-standing occupation on its own will no longer be treated as proof of ownership when the revenue record says otherwise.
Capital Development Authority Deputy Director General Enforcement Dr Anum Fatima said the authority would act against every unlawful occupant, adding that court stay orders would be challenged through the proper legal process while judicial directions are respected. The administration and the authority have said the recovery campaign will continue on the basis of verified revenue records and legal procedure, which suggests that Friday’s action in Malpur is a beginning rather than an end. If the records hold up in court, the drive could reshape who controls valuable commercial land along one of Islamabad’s busiest corridors, and it will test whether the city’s land administration can finally close the gap between what is written in its registers and what stands on the ground.
