LAHORE, Jan 28: Four men allegedly kidnapped the owner of a paper mills and his driver from Raiwind Road in Nawab Town police precincts and later abandoned his vehicle and driver near Lillah Interchange on the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway (M-II) on Saturday.

Teams of Lahore and Khushab police were chasing the suspects till the filing of this report. However, suspects have not contacted the family of the mills owner.

Syed Feroz Hasan, 36-year-old owner of Nazir Paper Mills, was going home by a chauffer-driven car (LEJ-2061) when four men came in a white car, intercepted them at gunpoint near Mr Hasan’s Kacchi Kothi residence and kidnapped them at around at 3:30pm.

As some locals witnessed the kidnapping, they informed Mr Hasan’s family which alerted the police.

The police immediately sought help from the satellite tracker company which reported that the locked car had been abandoned near Lahore airport. A wireless message was also radioed to the National Highways and Motorway Police (NH&MP) to monitor the movement of the two vehicles.

A police team combed the area in the vicinity of Lahore airport for two hours but could not find Mr Hasan’s car.

In the meantime, NH&MP police informed Nawab Town circle ASP Jehanzaib Khan that both the cars had used the motorway and the suspects had driven off towards Islamabad.

The NH&MP personnel, however, launched a hot pursuit on which the suspects abandoned both the cars and Hasan’s driver near Lillah Interchange and fled into adjoining fields.

The Motorway police later seized the cars and took the driver into custody.

A police official told Dawn the suspects first reached Lillah village from where they proceeded towards Dhag locality in Khushab district.

ASP Khan is heading one of the two teams despatched to Khushab district to trace the kidnapped mills owner and arrest the suspects.

Injured: Six labourers suffered burns when a tanker’s cavity exploded at a steel mills on Aamir Road in Shadbagh on Saturday.

The police said the explosion took place when labourers were cutting the iron walls of a tanker’s cavity with a gas beam.

Kashif, Akbar, Sarwar, Muhammad Husain, Ishaq and Mushtaq were taken to Mayo Hospital where Kashif is said to be in critical condition. The police said the tanker’s cavity was perhaps filled with some gases which got mixed up with the ignited gas and this might have led to the explosion.