Petty revenge: Bomb hoax caller arrested

MULTAN: Police claimed on Sunday claimed to have arrested a man for making a false bomb warning. A police spokesman said 28-year-old Ajmal had called the 15 emergency hotline from his 27-year-old friend Mumtaz’s cell phone, saying that a bomb had been planted in Multan Central Jail and at Shah Shamas police station. He said police had issued a red alert and sealed important buildings. He said security was also tightened around the district jail where two terrorists had been hanged last week. He said there were 34 other convicts at the jail who were on death row. He said after a five-hour operation, police declared that the call was a fake and started investigating the callers. CIA police had traced the number to Mumtaz who was arrested in a raid along with Ajmal. He said Ajmal had told them that he had placed the call after he was forced to pay a Rs10,000 bribe to policemen after he submitted a complaint about his phone being stolen. “I visited Shah Shamas police station numerous times over the last three months,” he had said. “Now that policemen felt threatened, they responded very quickly.”

Published in The Express Tribune, January 12^th, 2015.