A couple of senior police officers said police were looking into the case from all aspects and working on different leads. – File Photo

LAHORE: Personnel of a sensitive agency and the Lahore police have picked up five people for questioning after getting cell phone data of Shahbaz Taseer, who was kidnapped by unidentified people near his company’s head office in Gulberg on Friday, Dawn learnt on Saturday.

However, police teams working on the case failed to find any clue to Mr Shahbaz.

A couple of senior police officers said police were looking into the case from all aspects and working on different leads, however, the current pace of investigation and the information gathered from multiple people could not be shared with the media because of the sensitivity of the matter as it could hurt the investigation.

Police sources told Dawn that after tracing the latest calls from the cell phones of Mr Shahbaz, police detained three people and personnel of an intelligence agency picked two others and took them to unidentified locations.

They said one of the arrested men communicated with Mr Shahbaz when the latter was leaving his Cavalry Ground residence for Gulberg in the morning.

The sources said all the five arrested men knew Mr Shahbaz very well and at the time of his departure from home somebody knew that he was leaving without a police escort.

They further said in light of the investigation and statements obtained from the family members, friends and company staff of Mr Shahbaz, it was strongly suspected that the kidnapping was the part of a business-related dispute.

A police officer, who is associated with the investigation, told Dawn that police were also considering the aspect of kidnapping for ransom, but the family had yet to be contacted by the kidnappers.

He claimed that the family of Mr Shahbaz neither told the investigators about any business or property disputes nor mentioned any threats received from militants.

He said the data of Mr Shahbaz’s both cell phones had been collected to find out his recent conversations, adding the report of multiple fingerprints collected from the victim’s sports car and dispatched to Nadra for matching would be received by police shortly.

Police investigation in light of the CCTV footages showed that Mr Shahbaz was kidnapped in a white-colour Parado, rather in black one.

Meanwhile, policemen deployed on all important city roads and entry and exit points kept checking the suspected vehicles.

Police kept conducting search operations the whole day and several arrests were made.

Police also recorded statements of two Elite Police Force officials who were deputed with Mr Shahbaz.

Capital City Police Officer Malik Ahmed Raza told a news channel that it seemed that Shahbaz Taseer was being kept in Lahore by the kidnappers and that police were pulling out the data from the call logs of his phones.