LAHORE: Recovery of a youth, who was kidnapped in Lahore by an inter-province crime gang, from Lakki Marwat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, after hectic efforts by police, has exposed serious flaws in law enforcement and poor surveillance of traffic in Punjab and KP.

The youth who was kidnapped some three weeks back, has been recovered with dozens of torture marks on his body.

The recovery of Mohammad Azeem (22) was made possible only when some elders of Lakki Marwat, who were running a business in Lahore, mediated between the police and the kidnappers.

To recover Azeem safely, the Lahore Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) held many rounds of talks for two weeks with the mediators as they had set the condition that the police should forgo their demand of handover of the prime suspects behind the kidnap.

He was recovered from KP with the help of mediators

An official privy to the information say the kidnap case has exposed the highly compromised security arrangements by the law enforcers, resulting in almost unhindered transportation of the youth from Lahore to KP despite several checkpoints on the way.

He said the kidnappers covered nearly 490 kilometers distance from Lahore to the Lakki Marwat in KP with the blindfolded boy stuffed in their car’s boot, without being checked or noticed by the police of two provinces despite registration of a kidnap case and its details uploaded on the central online system of the Punjab police.

“The kidnappers belonging to the former tribal areas were equally influential in their home province as well as in Lahore, fearlessly running a kidnap-for-ransom network”, the official said.

Explaining their modus operandi, the official said the kidnappers trapped the boy using a young girl and their two “facilitators” in Lahore.

The mastermind of the crime hired the girl to develop friendship with Azeem and call him for a “date” at the Model Town Park in Lahore, where the facilitators would already be present.

As par the plan, the girl befriended the youth and later asked him to reach the park at 2:30pm on Aug 2, to meet her. As Azeem reached there, she gave a signal to the kidnappers to get him. After her job was done, the girl took money from the kidnappers and went away.

Moments later, they kidnapped the boy at gunpoint, injected him with some drug to weaken resistance and took him to an undisclosed place in Lahore, the official said.

He said the kidnappers kept Azeem there for a couple of days and then handed him over to their ringleader, who then transported the youth to Lakki Marwat, KP.

The official added that Lahore police had lodged a case against “unknown kidnappers”.

Azeem, after his recovery, told the police that the kidnappers had subjected him to severe torture nd detained him in the basement of a building located in the hilly area of Lakki Marwat.

The official said the police tracked down the facilitators using modern techniques and arrested them in a raid.

The police officers were also in contact with the mediators to get their help for the arrest of the actual culprits from Lakki Marwat, he said.

Published in Dawn, August 23rd, 2022