KARACHI, Aug 21: Police formally arrested on Thursday the father and two colleagues of the prime suspect in the HBL lockers heist, who is still untraceable.

Shah Mohammed, the security guard at the Mansfield Street bank branch, was named in the FIR (574/08). The suspect, belonging to Dara Adam Khel, had written a letter giving an eyewitness account of the crime before running away, ostensibly for fear of being implicated in the case.

However, the police believed that the letter was a decoy and it was aimed at diverting the course of investigation away from him.

The letter written by him said that Shah Mohammed was asleep in the bank when four men woke him up and took him hostage at gunpoint before breaking into the lockers. In the letter, the guard stated that he was fleeing for fear that the police would not believe his version of events and would eventually arrest him and subject him to torture.

Shah Mohammed and an unknown number of accomplices are suspected of having broken into the lockers using gas-driven power cutters sometime between Aug 14 and 15, and taking away cash, prize bonds, savings certificates and other valuables worth millions of rupees.

The SP investigation, South 2, Niaz Ahmed Khoso, told Dawn that Noor Zali, father of the prime suspect, and two security guards – Chinar Ali Wali and Gul Hussain – were arrested in the case.

He said the investigation police had written a letter to the Sindh home department for dispatching an investigators’ team to the NWFP to track down the absconding prime suspect.

Meanwhile, sources said the Excellent Security Agency was being supervised by a bank employee and it provided security service exclusively to the HBL.

They said the ESA was manned by former HBL guards who had opted for the golden handshake scheme and retired from the bank.

The sources said almost 90 per cent of the guards in the agency hailed from Dara Adam Khel and its adjoining areas and most of them were related to one another.

The sources said the suspect’s father was also a guard with ESA, posted at another HBL branch.

They said a police party would be leaving soon for Kohat, where the prime suspect’s married sister lives with her family.

The sources said the police had also asked the jail authorities to provide them with the record of visits of Shah Mohammed’s interned brother, booked and arrested by the Taimuria police for his involvement in a robbery.

They said the arrested two guards had also keys of the bank’s main gate. The sources said one of the arrested guards was posted with Shah Mohammed at the bank, but he absented himself from work on that day.

The sources said the police would produce the three arrested suspects before a judicial magistrate for obtaining their physical custody for interrogation and investigation.

The police had taken Shah Mohammed’s father and his two colleagues into custody immediately after the registration of the case against the prime suspect.