A Safe City Islamabad camera installed at Faizabad Metro Station has been stolen, raising fresh questions about the security and monitoring of the capital’s surveillance network.
According to police, the stolen device was a face recognition camera worth around Rs. 90,000. The camera reportedly went offline on April 19, but it was only after several days of continuous disruption that technical teams visited the site and discovered it was missing.
Officials later reviewed the last footage recorded before the device went offline and found that a man had stolen the camera. Despite the theft being captured on the surveillance system itself, the incident went unnoticed for days. A case was eventually registered at Industrial Area police station on April 28 under Section 379 of the Pakistan Penal Code.
The incident has once again exposed weaknesses in the response mechanism of the Safe City system, especially as it reportedly took nine days to confirm that the camera had been stolen.
This is not the first such case in Islamabad. In April 2024, two Safe City cameras worth Rs. 1.1 million installed on Koral flyover were found non-functional, but authorities did not take serious action for several days.
In September 2023, another camera worth Rs. 120,000 near Margalla police station was stolen, with officials learning about the theft nearly two weeks later. In October 2025, equipment including a battery worth Rs. 35,000 was also stolen from a Safe City installation in G-9/2.
The repeated thefts come despite the government’s heavy spending on Islamabad’s surveillance infrastructure. Last year, authorities approved a Rs. 7.499 billion project to expand Safe City coverage to around 90 percent of the capital.
The original Islamabad Safe City Project was launched in 2016 at a cost of Rs. 6 billion and was later handed over to Islamabad Police in 2019.