SUKKUR: Two moneylenders, along with several of their associates, were booked on Friday in connection with the suicide committed by a lecturer, Anwar Ali Panhiyar, in his home a day earlier.

The Airport police of Jacobabad took the matter seriously after Panhiyar’s wife, Mehrun Nissa, and the police investigators inspecting the couple’s room found a suicide note left by the deceased.

Addressed to the Jacobabad SSP, the suicide note read that he was taking this step of killing himself under immense pressure being exerted by moneylenders Lala Zahoor Pathan and Mumtaz Marhato alias Adnan Sindhi along with their associates.

The deceased lecturer wrote that the moneylenders had made his life miserable by constantly threatening and blackmailing him. “They hurl insults and abuses wherever they find me e.g. at home, in the neighbourhood and even in the office,” he wrote, and added that he preferred to die than living such a disgraceful life.

Panhiyar also stated in the note that it was a typical treatment used to be meted out by these and other moneylenders to their defaulting loan borrowers, many of whom might already have resorted to committing suicide.

Mehrun Nissa told the police that her husband, employed at a polytechnic college, had lately been finding it too difficult to pay the heavy monthly interest against the borrowed amount.

The couple is a resident of Dakhan area of Jacobabad district. Pahinyar’s family members knocked at the door of his room on Thursday evening to provide him food but after waiting for long and receiving no response, one of them scaled the wall to peep into the room, and saw his body hanging with a rope.

Jacobabad SSP Saddam Hussain Khaskheli ordered immediate arrest of the suspects named in the suicide note. The police had detained several suspects, believed to be associates of the nominated suspects, till Friday evening and were conducting raids at different places within the Dakhan area to arrest other suspects.

An FIR against Mohammad Younus Chakhro, Lala Zahoor Pathan, Mumtaz Marhato alias Adnan Sindhi and others vide crime No. 98/2024 was registered on the complaint of Mehrun Nissa.

Published in Dawn, October 5th, 2024