A judicial magistrate in Karachi on Monday granted post-arrest bail to Armaghan Qureshi, the prime suspect in the Mustafa Amir murder case, in a case involving an illegal call centre and credit card data theft.

Amir, 23, was allegedly kidnapped and murdered by his friends — Armaghan and Sheraz — in Karachi’s Defence Housing Authority (DHA) on Jan 6, 2025. According to the police, the youth’s friends stuffed his body in the trunk of his car and torched it in the Hub area of Balochistan.

A final charge sheet against Armaghan in the murder case was filed in August. Besides multiple other cases, Armaghan had also been implicated in the data theft case in a first information report (FIR) registered with the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on April 16, 2025.

Judicial magistrate (South) took up Armaghan’s bail plea today. Advocate Khurram Abbas appeared as his defence counsel and informed the court that the investigation against the suspect had been completed in 2025.

“Not a single shred of evidence was presented against the suspect. Neither is there any complaint nor any private witness against the suspect,” the lawyer argued.

Subsequently, the magistrate approved Armaghan’s bail plea against surety bonds worth Rs100,000.

However, Armaghan will remain in jail as multiple cases against him are still pending in court. Besides the murder case, FIRs against Armaghan had also been filed over injuring policemen during a February shoot-out that resulted in his arrest, recovery of imported illegal weapons and money laundering.

In its FIR, the FIA had claimed that Armaghan was allegedly operating an “illegal call centre” in Karachi’s DHA. The FIA further alleged that the call centre was used for harassing people, engaging in fraudulent practices, identity impersonation, cheating, spoofing, phishing, and extortion.

It added that the employees of the said call centre were trained to impersonate officials from international agencies to extract sensitive information such as names, debit or credit details and social security numbers.

The FIA claimed that illegal transactions were carried out on the instructions of Armaghan alias Alex Boss.

Regarding the modus operandi, the agency stated that the suspect obtained financial information and processed it through the website www.oet.com to verify its authenticity. The credit cards were typically charged without any service being rendered, the FIA added.

In July 2025, the investigating officer (IO) of the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) informed a judicial magistrate that Armaghan had rented two properties to set up call centres in Lahore and Islamabad after Amir’s murder.