1st chief of CBI's forerunner police outfit to be honoured

The first Chief of Special Police Establishment (SPE), the forerunner of CBI, is to be honoured posthumously during the upcoming Golden Jubilee celebrations of the probe agency for which his Pakistan-based family has been invited.
CBI has approached the Ministry of External Affairs for making necessary arrangements and requisite travel documents for the Lahore-based family of Khan Bahadur Qurban Ali Khan, an officer from the erstwhile Indian Police (IP), official sources said here today.
Khan will be among a host of former Directors of the country's premier probe agency who will be honoured at the April six event here to commemorate 50 years of CBI, which came into existence in 1963, the sources said.

The CBI has also renamed one of the blocks in Ghaziabad Academy after him as a mark of respect, they said.
SPE, which was set up in 1941 by the British Government, was designated to investigate cases of bribery and corruption in transactions with the War and Supply Department of India, which was set up during the course of World War II, with Lahore in undivided India as its headquarters.
Khan, who was the Superintendent of War Department, was made the Chief Administrator of SPE.

Even after the end of the War, the need for a central agency to investigate cases of bribery and corruption by Central Government employees was felt.

The Delhi Special Police Establishment Act was, therefore, brought into force in 1946 and Khan continued to head this department till partition after which he migrated to Pakistan and was appointed as Inspector General of one of the province of North West Frontier Province(NWFP, now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
Khan, whose age and year of death was not immediately known, had also become Governor of North West Frontier Province from 1954-55. He retired as Inspector General of Police in 1953.
Khan is considered as one of the founding members of Pakistan's spy agency ISI which was formed in 1950. Besides gathering external intelligence, ISI was also monitoring the uprisings in NWFP where he was a top police official.