The National Accountability Bureau (NAB) has recovered encroached land belonging to Pakistan Railways worth more than Rs90 billion in the federal capital, the bureau said in a press release on Thursday.

NAB’s Islamabad/Rawalpindi region said a special task force set up to safeguard and retrieve Railways land had recovered 1,395 kanals and three marlas, with an estimated value of Rs91.234 billion, and handed it over to Pakistan Railways. The land lies in the revenue estates of Bhulkar, Phulak, Lok and Loi Bher in Islamabad.

The bureau also said it had arrested a real estate builder, Mubasher Hayat, on charges of cheating the public through ventures including EarthLink Developments.

The recovery is the latest in NAB’s wider campaign to reclaim Railways land. At a briefing on 20 October, NAB Chairman retired Lt Gen Nazir Ahmed Butt said the bureau had recovered 235,622 kanals of Pakistan Railways land valued at about Rs6.78 trillion, and argued that auctioning the reclaimed land could generate more than Rs10 trillion, enough to finance the long-delayed Main Line-1 (ML-I) railway project without foreign borrowing.

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