ISLAMABAD: As Saqlain Arshad, 25, steps into a colorful kennel, Paal, a tracker dog at the Islamabad police’s Canine Unit, stands ready to join duty. This time, however, it is not an outside assignment but a mock training session that handlers regularly conduct to keep these dogs, whom their handlers proudly call “silent heroes,” in shape to take up field assignments.
Arshad holds out a cap belonging to a colleague who hid a few hundred feet away. As soon as he loosens the leash, Paal leaps and pauses briefly to scent the cap before heading straight to the target crouched behind a car. Upon finding the target, Muhammad Salman, the unit’s 60-year-old supervisor, tosses a tennis ball that Paal catches midair — his reward for a job well done.
Daily rehearsals like these ensure Islamabad police dogs are always prepared and prove their effectiveness in tracking drugs and criminals. Police solved one such case this year, when they received a missing complaint about 28-year-old Hamza Khan, who left his home in Islamabad for Mansehra on March 15, but never returned, with his family naming a retired Islamabad police superintendent, Arif Shah, as the last person Khan had gone to meet over a financial dispute.
