KARACHI: About 50 persons, including business executives, professors and students, have so far been questioned during the current probe into surveys conducted by the US Embassy in Karachi and other parts of the country, according to reliable sources. The probe ordered by the Government of Pakistan, is still on and more persons who associated themselves with the `unauthorised surveys` are being interrogated by the authorities.

Those who had already been questioned, it is understood, have made important disclosures about the methods adopted by the US Embassy to conduct the surveys through Pakistanis by granting them contracts for `big sums`. The unauthorised practice was exposed last month when the US Embassy through its Information Service made an attempt to collect [the] opinion of Pakistanis on highly sensitive questions relating to Pakistan`s foreign policy.

OfHcial sources conducting the probe told `Dawn` that so far no one from the US Embassy or its Information Service had been examined.

Those being questioned so far were all Pakistanis who had conducted the past surveys and were making fresh attempts. The authorities are believed to have taken into custody certain documents including survey forms. The names of those who had obtained `contracts` for surveys, are being kept secret by the probing officers. Staff Correspondent [Meanwhile, as reported by agencies from London], Mr Maurice Foley, British minister-incharge of immigrants integration, warned yesterday that failure to eliminate racial discrimination in Britain could lead to a growth of white racialism. `Failure to work out solutions could well lead to a growth of extremism, a hardening of attitudes, and an increasing number subscribing to white racialism, and even immigrant communities contracting out of society and developing their own brand of militancy,` he said.