District Courts Duty Judge Shabana Hameed Mughal on Tuesday granted bail to an Uzbek woman, under Women Protection Act, ignoring the request of Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) for a 10-day physical remand.
The woman was allegedly involved in unauthorised Voiceover Internet Protocols (VoIP), thus causing loss of millions of rupees to the public exchequer. An FIR was registered against Gahramanova Aliyya, an Uzbek national, under section 31 of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, on the complaint of the PTA director enforcement. According to the FIR, PTA received a report that the IP allocated to M/s LinkDotNet at a house in Sector G-11/1, Islamabad, was being used for illegal voice calls termination. PTA, through its system of monitoring and reconciliation of International Telephony Traffic (ITT), found that the Uzbek woman, Gahramanova Aliyya, along with others was involved in the use of unauthorised VoIP gateway installed at Sector G-11/1 Islamabad.
The complainant submitted relevant record of all the calls terminated through this system. FIA initiated legal action by registering a case and obtained search warrants from the court of a judicial magistrate. A raiding party reached G-11/1, Islamabad, to unearth the gateway exchange being operated for illegal termination of international voice traffic, using unauthorised VoIP. An FIA team raided the place where the accused persons were running an illegal gateway exchange, but no accused could be arrested from the place.
According to the FIA, the female accused established illegal gateway exchanges in the federal capital’s different sectors where international calls were being entertained and converted into VoIP, and by using Internet as a medium, the calls were being transmitted to Pakistan. The calls were being converted from VoIP into GSM and transmitted to destination telephone numbers. The FIA obtained arrest warrants for the Uzbek woman on August 1, 2011, from a court, arrested her on August 8 and produced her before the court with a request for 10-day physical remand. The duty judge granted bail to the accused under Women Protection Act and ordered her production on August 19, the next date of hearing.
