Highway robbery: Six men arrested for looting NATO container

KARACHI: Six men have been arrested in connection with a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) supply container that was plundered on October 28.

On Thursday, a special crime branch team apprehended five men and the container’s owner who also was reportedly involved in the assault that left the driver, Latifullah, dead.

The men, Niazi and Haris, Arif, Mehtab, Nasir and Zakir, took off with the goods in the container and left the driver’s body and vehicle in Gadap Town.

Police allege that the owner, Malik Javed Khan Niazi, was the mastermind behind the plan and the conductor, Haris, was in cahoots with him.

A Crime Branch senior police officer, Irfan Ahmed, told The Express Tribune that, on Thursday morning, the police received an intelligence report claiming that the suspects were hiding in Manghopir’s Gulshan-e-Bihar area near the Northern Bypass.

“We raided the location and detained all six people,” said DSP Ahmed. “They had transferred the goods to an empty plot in the same area which has now been seized.”

According to police, the container was loaded with a large number of electric batteries and boxes of medicines. “They were waiting for a buyer who would give them suitable price for the loot,” explained Inspector Khuda Bukhsh of the Crime Branch.

“They would then easily be sold in local markets.” The inspector claimed that the robbers are originally from the Mianwali district and have been involved in similar raids for a few years now.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 11^th,  2011.

Correction: An earlier version of this story did not match the headline of this post. The error is regretted.