Three years after he was let off the hook by a government commission, a former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions for plagiarizing a student thesis in a paper from 2020, Retraction Watch has learned.
Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, is now professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Gujrat. According to a report issued on November 20 by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Islamabad, Tahir and his coauthors have been barred from supervising graduate students for three years and also have received a warning for their offense.
Meanwhile, the University of Gujrat removed Tahir from his position as director of the institution’s Advanced Study & Research Board on December 3, according to a notification we obtained.
“This marks the first institutional action resulting directly from the confirmed plagiarism findings,” Farukh Iqbal, who brought the charges against Tahir, told us.
The case goes back to 2020, when Iqbal was working toward a doctorate in chemical engineering in Australia and noticed a new paper in Fuel that was clearly based on his master’s thesis. He alerted the journal, which pulled the offending article in 2021, as we reported at the time.
Iqbal also complained to the HEC, which found the retracted paper was based on the master’s thesis of Numair Manzoor, one of Tahir’s students. Manzoor’s thesis, in turn, was “completely plagiarized” from Iqbal’s, according to an expert committee convened by the HEC, as we reported in 2023.
Tahir argued without proof that Iqbal was the one who had plagiarized Manzoor’s work, and not the other way around. He also said he had been unaware that the paper was submitted. And he filed a 500 million rupee (~$2,800,000USD) defamation suit against Iqbal.
Based on Tahir’s inconsistent claims of ignorance, the HEC expert committee recommended against penalizing the then-vice chancellor in February 2022. Iqbal appealed the decision the following month, but nothing happened.
A year later, on the morning of March 13, 2023, we contacted the HEC for the story we ran the following day. We heard nothing back. But that same day, the HEC constituted a new expert committee to review Iqbal’s appeal, according to a committee report we obtained. The report, which was signed on July 10, 2023, but has not been disclosed until now, shows the committee recommended punishing all of the authors of the plagiarized paper, including Tahir. But for more than two years, the HEC did not act on these recommendations.
Unaware of the committee’s decision, Iqbal complained to the Higher Education Department (HED) of the Government of Punjab, a provincial organ that has no power over the national HEC, but can ask for updates on university matters. On October 30 of this year, the HED sent a letter to the HEC inquiring about Iqbal’s appeal. The HEC’s November 20 report, which adhered to the expert committee’s recommendations from 2023, is addressed to the HED as a direct response to its request for an update.
“Deputy Secretary Dr. Saima Anwar [of the HED] handled the matter with exceptional integrity and ensured that my appeal – stalled for years – was finally processed,” Iqbal told us by email. “HEC disclosed the old decision and declared punishment (Minor Penalty) to all authors.”
According to a court document he shared with us, Tahir has challenged HEC’s decision in court. He told us the case is under consideration and did not comment further.
But Iqbal said the court had “declined to grant any interim relief [to Tahir]. It did not suspend or stay the HEC decision; instead, it simply issued notices to the parties for a later hearing.”
Iqbal also noted dozens of studies by Tahir and his coauthors had been flagged on PubPeer, and some have been retracted.
“The plagiarism case that triggered this process is now legally finalized by HEC, but the broader pattern of misconduct is still unfolding at the journal level,” he said.
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