A case has been registered against a trio of Punjab police constables accused of harassing, filming and blackmailing couples in Lahore for money.
The case had first become public knowledge last month when the said police officials had accused Punjab Minister for Housing Mahmoodur Rasheed's son and his friends of kidnapping them, snatching their weapons, torturing them and hurling threats.
The policemen, named Nadeem Iqbal, Usman Mushtaq and Usman Saeed, had claimed that they allegedly caught a young couple in a car. As the couple was being taken to the police station, the man — identified as Ali Mustafa — had called Mian Hasan, the son of Punjab Minister for Housing Mahmoodur Rasheed.
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Police had further claimed that the suspects, led by Hasan, snatched guns from the constables, bundled them into their cars and drove away before dropping the kidnapped policemen at different places and fled away.
However, according to a first information report (FIR) filed on Sunday, an inquiry and analysis of the police officials' phones found several videos of couples being blackmailed and even tortured.
The FIR filed by Ghalib Market Station House Officer (SHO) Rehan Jamal stated that in the aforementioned case, the police officials had snatched Mustafa's wallet and taken Rs2,000 from it, while demanding that he pay them Rs50,000 more.
SHO Jamal, in the FIR, said that the police constables' actions were "against the police discipline and utterly illegal", and resulted in bringing a bad name to the police.
The SHO recommended that strict departmental action be taken against the accused.