Raid: Robbers, fraudsters busted

Police claim suspects also duped lawmakers into providing ‘donations for mosques’

ISLAMABAD: The police claim to have arrested a fraudster allegedly involved in several attempts to mint money from parliamentarians on the pretext of constructing mosques in Lahore and Haripur, it was revealed on Monday.

The fraudster — Liaqat Hussain — along with his accomplices, including a dismissed official of the Frontier Constabulary (FC), was also allegedly involved in snatching a vehicle each from a former ambassador and a woman, deprived students of their valuables and served time in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Muzaffarabad, AJK.

During initial investigations, it was revealed that Hussain would contact personal assistants of lawmakers asking them for donations for construction of mosques after introducing himself as ‘colonel Masood and general Sarfaraz’.

“After disguising himself as a army officers he used to request them to donate money,” said Secretariat Circle DSP Bashir Noon. He added that a separate case under the telegraph act (25-D) has been also registered against him for this offence and further details were being collected.

While refusing to share names of politicians, Noon said the police were still investigating how much money was taken from politicians.

The DSP informed that the Secretariat police busted an inter-provincial gang of robbers and recovered weapons from them. He explained that they have confessed to their involvement in several robberies in the capital, Kashmir as well as various cities of Punjab.

The suspected gangsters, identified as Ashraf, Asif Shehzad, Javed, Hanif, Sohail, Zameer and Hussain, were arrested in a raid near Korang Road when they were hiding in the bushes to commit a robbery a few days ago, the police said. The police also claimed to have seized five pistols and recovered motorcycles, laptops and mobile phones from their possession.

Noon said that Ashraf was dismissed from the FC and was allegedly involved in criminal activities in Mansehra, adding that it has surfaced that some of the suspects spent time behind bars in AJK and K-P.

The suspected criminals have confessed to snatching a vehicle from former ambassador Tariq Afridi on December 16, 2014 from near Korang Road and selling it in AJK. They also confessed to have snatched a car from a woman, Fouzia Ashraf, in the same area on November 26, 2014, the police informed.

In the first incident, the suspects blocked the road with some heavy stones while in the second episode they blocked the road with the help of a stolen motorcycle, said Noon. “One thing was common in both cases. The suspects kept the victims hostage till their accomplices managed to cross the capital’s limits,” he said. “It was a move to restrict the victims of informing the police through 15,” he said.

He added that the stolen motorcycle was impounded and the ambassador’s vehicle has also been located and will soon be brought back to the capital.

In addition, they also confessed to committing a robbery at Al-Basit traders located at Murree Road in Bhara Kahu on October 21, 2014 and snatching valuables and cash from people present in the shop, said the police.

Additionally, the suspects also snatched laptops, cash and mobile phones from students of Quaid-i-Azam University near the anthropology department on December 22, 2014, added the official.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 20^th, 2015.