KARACHI: A sessions court has extended the physical remand of bureaucrat Zameer Abbasi to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in a corruption case for another four days.
The FIA brought the suspect before the District and Sessions Judge (South) and sought an extension of his physical custody for further interrogation.
Speaking to Dawn, defence counsel Nasrullah Korai said he argued before the court that the agency had failed to show any progress in the investigation.
Regarding the allegation of currency exchange, the counsel contended that the FIA had not provided any information about with whom his client had allegedly exchanged the money or who had allegedly transferred the money to foreign countries.
He said the FIA claimed that Mr Abbasi had allegedly used benami accounts of his wife and father. He said the allegation regarding the benami accounts does not fall under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.
Meanwhile, he also filed pre-arrest bail pleas of Mr Abbasi’s wife and his father before the sessions judge.
After hearing the arguments, the court extended physical custody of Mr Abbasi for further four days and granted interim bail to Muhammad Pannah Abbasi and Khansa Zameer against surety bond of Rs500,000 each.
The court directed them to join the investigation and fixed the matter for hearing for confirmation or otherwise on Sept 30.
The FIA’s Commercial Banking Circle (CBC) had arrested Mr Abbasi, a grade-19 officer of the Sindh government, after he secured bail from the Sindh High Court in the Rs8.5 billion Yellow Line graft case.
Mr Abbasi has been booked in a case registered under Sections 4 (restrictions on dealing in foreign exchange), 5 (restrictions on payments), 8 (restrictions on import and export of certain currency and bullion), 23 (penalty and procedure) of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, 1947 read with 109 (abetment) and 34 (common intention) of the Pakistan Penal Code at the FIA’s Commercial Banking Circle (CBC) police station.
According to the FIR, the CBC got “credible information” that the suspect allegedly shifted huge funds from the accounts of the provincial government to his own bank accounts abroad for which purpose he had frequently visited the UAE, Maldives, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and the US.
The agency alleged that he was also involved in “irregularities relating to cooperative society elections”.
It added that the suspect also got 1,103 currency transactions of huge amounts from his father’s and wife’s accounts during the period from 2012 to 2026.
Published in Dawn, September 26th, 2026
