BAHAWALNAGAR: A schoolteacher who was in custody facing charges of online gambling and kidnap-cum-murder of his close friend was shot dead in an alleged encounter on the Haroonabad Road on Saturday.

Bahawalnagar District Police Officer (DPO) Nassebullah Khan told Dawn that 22-year-old Talha Arshad, a resident of Mohallah Tailianwala, had gone missing on Jan 17 and a case was registered against unidentified men on the complaint of his brother, Irfan Arshad.

The kidnappers had received Rs1.3m ransom from Talha’s family in their cryptocurrency (Binance) account. Police were still searching for Talha’s abductors who were constantly changing their locations from one city to another and using the VPN on their phones when the victim’s body was found in a well on Jan 31.

The suspects involved in the case were highly educated and they had left no clue behind. A tech-savvy team, under the supervision of investigating officer Wahab Aslam, was formed to trace the suspects while the assistance of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Counter-Terrorism Department (CTD) was also sought in the case.

Cryptocurrency, online gambling were the cause of murder

Police arrested some suspects, including Talha’s close friend, Hameed, a government schoolteacher. During the interrogation, Hameed confessed to Talha’s kidnapping and murder.

Hameed told the police that many of his university fellows, including Talha, were involved in online gambling and his friends and he himself had lost millions of rupees to Talha.

To take revenge of their loss, Hameed confessed that he and his friends called Talha to a place outside the city through WhatsApp calls, shot him dead the same night and dumped his body into a well. They demanded a ransom of Rs10m from his family for his release and received Rs1.3m in two installments.

After Talha’s murder, they had a plan to kidnap and kill their other classmates belonging to rich families and collect ransom from their families as they had received from Talha’s family.

On Hameed’s information, police arrested one of his accomplices, a software engineer named Aqib, a resident of Bahawalnagar, from Lahore. Aqib also confessed to being involved with Hameed in the kidnap and murder of Talha. Police recovered the murder weapon, Talha’s documents and other items on the information given by Hameed.

According to police, when they were taking Hameed for recovery of the motorcycle used in the incident, four of his accomplices attacked the police team on the Haroonabad Road in an attempt to free their friend on Saturday. The attackers managed to escape due to the retaliatory fire from police while Hameed was killed on the spot allegedly as a result of the firing by his accomplices.

According to the DPO, Hameed had made a plan to kidnap and kill another young man from Minchinabad but his plan failed due to timely action of police.

The DPO said the raids were being conducted to arrest the escaped gang members.

Published in Dawn, February 18th, 2024