‘Fake Taliban ameer’ arrested for extortion

Second such case reported in Lahore in one month.

LAHORE:

The police have arrested a man who they said had been threatening members of the Shia community by pretending to be a leader of the Taliban, the second such case in the city in a month.

Gulberg police arrested Ghazanfar Ali on Wednesday and registered a case against him under Sections 384 (extortion) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and Section 25 of the Telegraph Act.

Police officials said that Ali, who is from Peshawar and recently moved to Chungi Amar Sidhu, had telephoned Syed Israr Shah, chief engineer at the Public Health Department, and threatened to kill him if he didn’t pay up Rs20 million.

Shah handed his mobile phone to the police, who were able to trace Ali through subsequent phone calls. They said that Shah had telephoned and threatened other Shias as well. They said that he would find a target, find out where they lived and other information about them, and then call and threaten them. They said that he would introduce himself as “Punjab ameer of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan”.

The police officials said that they had found no evidence that Ali was a member of a banned militant group or that he even knew anyone from a militant group.

A similar case was reported at Ravi Road police station on August 7, when police officials said that they had arrested a man named Abdul Rizwan alias Janu for making threatening phone calls and trying to extort an industrialist by posing as a leader of the Taliban.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 6^th, 2012.