ISLAMABAD: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday began a probe into a phone call, which was made on the night of the July 25 general polls and identified the failure of Results Transmission System (RTS) in order to determine the person behind the instructions.
The FIA has initiated the probe on the request of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP).
Earlier, the ECP had written a letter to director general FIA to investigate and identify the caller who had directed that the RTS be shut down. The electoral body had also sent the audio clip to the investigation agency and called for a forensic test.
The letter, dated August 30, said that a USB drive containing soundbite of the phone call has been sent to the agency to run forensic tests to identify the person that had made the phone call.
The Senate committee was told that the RTS had only yielded 20 per cent results when it was tested in PP-20 (Chakwal) ahead of the elections.
In the audio, a man can be heard telling presiding officers that “there is a major issue with the RTS and using it is not a mandatory option for us”.
The controversy of RTS failure surfaced when the transmission of election results stopped abruptly around midnight after the polling day ended.
ECP Secretary Fateh had informed that the RTS had “collapsed” and that the commission was now returning to the traditional and manual method of tabulating the results and, therefore, there could be an inordinate delay in the announcement of the unofficial results.
However, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), the RTS developer, had later said that the system remained fully functional and did not shut down at all during the elections.
“The RTS has no connection with the Result Management System (RMS),” said a Nadra spokesperson earlier, adding that perhaps the RMS, the ECP’s own independent systems that are installed at the offices of the returning officers (ROs) for tabulation of the results, had stopped working which have no integration with the RTS.
