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ISLAMABAD: The Federal Investigation Agency has arrested in Ecuador a Pakistani convicted by a British court in Feb 2004 for murdering a man in the United Kingdom.
The interior ministry said on Saturday that other culprits in the case had already been arrested in the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan.
Rizwan Habib Alvi, a model agency executive, had been awarded a life sentence at the Old Bailey for beating to death the son of a Pakistani tycoon on Dec 16, 2001, dumping his body in a river in Surrey and stealing his identity documents.
Alvi and his gang then went on a spending spree in Las Vegas, running up bills of thousands of pounds on the victim’s credit cards before heading to Australia, Dubai and Canada.
The gang also tried to transfer 260,000 pounds from the victim’s bank accounts but could not succeed because he had changed his password days before his death.
The British police then tracked Alvi down. He was arrested in Canada and deported to the UK.
Under an agreement signed with the UK in 2010, he and the accomplices were to complete the rest of their sentences in Pakistan, but were fraudulently released days after being brought to the country.
On the orders of Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, employees of his ministry and Punjab police who helped in the illegal release of the convicts were arrested later. The agreement on exchange of prisoners was abolished by the UK in 2012 after the fraudulent release of the convicts, but it has been restored after the measures taken by the minister.
Alvi’s latest arrest has been made possible with the help of Interpol.
Published in Dawn March 8th , 2015
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