A former university vice chancellor in Pakistan is facing sanctions three years after a government commission initially cleared him of accusations of plagiarism. Muhammad Suleman Tahir is now barred from supervising graduate students for three years and received a warning for plagiarizing a student thesis in a 2020 paper.
Plagiarism Case Reopened
Muhammad Suleman Tahir, previously of Khwaja Fareed University of Engineering and Information Technology, currently serves as professor and chair of the department of chemical engineering at the University of Gujrat. According to a report issued November 20 by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Islamabad, Tahir and his coauthors have been sanctioned for their offense.
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 obtained by Retraction Watch.
“This marks the first institutional action resulting directly from the confirmed plagiarism findings,” Farukh Iqbal, who brought the charges against Tahir, stated.
Original Complaint and Retraction
The case dates back to 2020, when Iqbal, then a chemical engineering doctoral candidate in Australia, noticed a paper published in Fuel that closely mirrored his master’s thesis. He alerted the journal, which retracted the article in 2021.
Iqbal also filed a complaint with the HEC, which determined the retracted paper was based on the master’s thesis of Numair Manzoor, one of Tahir’s students. An HEC expert committee found Manzoor’s thesis was “completely plagiarized” from Iqbal’s work.
Tahir had argued, without evidence, that Iqbal was the plagiarist and claimed he was unaware the paper had been submitted. He also filed a defamation lawsuit against Iqbal for 500 million Pakistani rupees (approximately $2,800,000 USD).
Delayed Action and Recent Developments
In February 2022, the HEC expert committee initially recommended against penalizing Tahir, citing his claims of ignorance. Iqbal appealed this decision in March 2022, but no action was taken.
Following contact from Retraction Watch on March 13, 2023, regarding the story, the HEC constituted a new expert committee to review Iqbal’s appeal. The committee recommended punishing all authors of the plagiarized paper, including Tahir, in a report signed on July 10, 2023, but the HEC did not act on these recommendations for over two years.
The HEC responded to an inquiry from the Higher Education Department (HED) of the Government of Punjab, issuing its November 20 report, which adhered to the 2023 expert committee’s recommendations.
“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 said.
Tahir has challenged the HEC’s decision in court. He stated the case is under consideration and declined further comment. However, Iqbal reported that the court declined to grant Tahir interim relief, issuing notices for a later hearing.
Iqbal also noted that dozens of studies by Tahir and his coauthors have been flagged on PubPeer, with some having 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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