HYDERABAD, Sept 10: A petitioner prayed the Hyderabad circuit bench of the Sindh High Court on Wednesday to take notice misappropriation of pubic wealth in the name of lottery schemes and order a probe into the scam.

The petitioner, Mohammad Akram Mughal of Nawabshah, said that people had been cheated out of millions of rupees through these schemes and he was one of them.

He said that he got 52 tokens of a lottery scheme after paying Rs52,000 in Rs1,000 instalments to Naeem Bhai and Ayub Arain, who ran the scheme jointly.

When he won a token of Rs30,000 and asked them to pay him the money they expressed annoyance and showed reluctance to pay though he requested them repeatedly that he badly needed the money, he said.

He said that they had him return the original copy of the token under some sham excuses and promised they would give it back. At the time, he was not aware of their actual plan and legal status of the scheme, he said.

He made contact with the unregistered committee to get back the amount he had paid in instalments but he did not get any response. He was told that he could not get his money back at any cost given the requirement of lucky draw scheme, he said.

Then, he stopped paying instalments and though all was over but it was not so. They men behind the scheme threatened and harassed him to keep paying the instalments and argued that since he had stopped making instalments he would have to pay it with mark-up, he said.

The petitioner said that after he filed a suit in lower court about the fraud he was called to A-section police station on May 3, 2008 at the instigation of the committee members where he was pressured to pay instalments.

He said that the respondent DPO and SHO of A-section police station should be restrained from harassing and blackmailing him. The court allowed time to a petitioner’s counsel to sue people who were involved in running the illegal lottery scheme in Nawabshah.