BADIN: The Khoski police on Monday said that no one picked up or detained during the FIA-Rangers raid on the Khoski Sugar Mills a day earlier was in their custody.

Khoski SHO Imam Dino Dahani told this reporter that the raiding agencies had confined the managerial staff and all other employees of the mills to their respective rooms during the course of the hours-long search for records and weapons on Sunday. He said that members of FIA`s raiding team interrogated the managerial staff and certain other employees during the search operation but almost all of them were allowed free movement when the operation was over.

The SHO made it clear that although some of the mills` employees might have been taken away by the FIA team for further investigation, no one was handed over to the area police and no FIR against anyone was registered at this police station.He said that a total of 11 firearms were deposited for verification.

SHO Dahani said that the FIA team had visited the police station for the purpose of bringing the raid on record and depositing the weapons they had found during the search operation.

`Some of them turned out to be legal as their licences were issued in the name of the Omni Group while the verification process of the remaining ones is under way,` he said.

The raid was conducted in connection with a Rs35 billion money laundering case against the Omni Group, which runs many sugar mills in Sindh and is headed by a close aide to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) cochairman Asif Ali Zardari. The FIA is also looking into alleged fake accounts maintained in three different banks, including Sindh Bank, to ascertain facts about heavy transactions and their beneficiaries.

It was learnt that seven senior officers belonging to the Omni Group/ Khoski Sugar Mills are in the custody of FIA.