May 31, 2007	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 14, 1428

ISLAMABAD, May 30: A criminal gang went on a robbery spree in the city on Wednesday and struck at four houses in the Margalla police station area. This was the second such incident in the city in the last three days in which gangs of robbers looted several people one after the other.

The residents of the area claimed that the gang, riding a car, went on a rampage in the area of Margalla police covering the E-8 to E-9, F-8 to F-9 and G-8 to G-9 sectors and struck at four houses in a row after taking the residents hostage.

This exercise continued for several hours without any police hindrance.

Before the police could react, the robbers fled from the area, taking the booty with them, which included cash and gold ornaments worth over one million rupees.

However, the police denied that these four robberies took place in their jurisdiction, adding that only one incident occurred in the house of a journalist.

When the senior superintendent of police, Zafar Iqbal, was contacted, he said the people of the locality had claimed that the gang was involved in various robberies in the area in recent past.

They also claimed that the same gang had robbed the house of the deputy secretary, administration of the prime minister’s secretariat, Chaudhry Abdul Hafiz, he added.

The sources said two police personnel had been deployed in each sector for patrolling on motorcycles and one litre of petrol was provided to them daily.

According to the sources, six robbers, armed with modern sophisticated weapons, entered the house of Tahir Jamal, a reporter associated with Daily Al-Akhbar, in sector G-9/4 and held his mother, wife and one-and-a-half years old son at gunpoint.

Later, the robbers tied them up and searched the house for over an hour-and-a-half. They escaped with Rs395,000 in cash, gold ornaments weighing 20 tola, a pistol and three mobile phones.

This was the second incident in the capital in the last three days in which two gangs of robbers looted a number of people.