KARACHI, March 6: In yet another daredevil robbery, four armed men looted Rs8 million meant for a bank in Shershah and injured a security guard on Thursday, police and witnesses said.

The robbers struck a day after a gang of 10 criminals walked off with Rs4.5 million from a UBL branch in Defence. Earlier on Feb 8, four masked gunmen stormed into a commercial bank, killed a security guard, and robbed the bank in Ranchore Lane of over Rs1 million. Al Qaeda-linked militant Qasim Toori, who was arrested in February, has been charged with having been involved in a Saudabad bank robbery that left three men, including a police constable, dead.

According to the data made available to Dawn by police, at least 21 robberies took place in different parts of Karachi during 2007.

While the local police said they had no idea who could be behind the series of daredevil robberies, the Director-General of the Federal Investigation Agency, Tariq Pervaiz, said he did not rule out the possibility of the involvement of militants belonging to proscribed organizations.

However, he hastened to add that there was no specific information about the involvement of Jihadi groups in bank robberies at the moment.

Shershah SHO Aman Marwat told Dawn that a security company van carrying Rs41 million left the Bank Al Habib headquarters on I.I. Chundrigar Road to deliver the money to the bank’s four branches.

He said that four bandits on two bikes struck at around 11am when the two guards of a private security company, one of them carrying the money bag, alighted from the van in front of Bank Al Habib in Shershah. He added that the bandits were believed to have been chasing the van since it set out from the bank headquarters.

He said the two guards, Waris Ali and Mohammed Ashraf, were taken hostage at gunpoint by the bandits, one of whom snatched the money bag.

The SHO said the robbers opened fire on the guards and one of them sustained a bullet wound in his abdomen during his struggle with them. However, sources at the Civil Hospital, where the injured guard was brought for medical treatment, said the injured man was in a stable condition as there was hardly a trace of bullet wound on his body. The medico-legal officer said the bullet might have barely grazed the guard’s belly.

The SHO said a head constable, posted at the bank, returned fire, but the robbers got away with the cash on their bikes.

He said three guards, armed with pistols, accompanied the cash van while the fourth one, who kept a repeater, did not turn up on Thursday and the van left the bank’s headquarters without him.

The police registered a case under Sections 392, 397 read with 34 of the Pakistan Penal Code on the complaint of one of the guards, Mohammed Ashraf.

The police said the guards belonged to the NWFP.

Meanwhile, sources said the Special Investigation Group (SIG), an arm of the FIA set up to investigate terrorism cases, had asked the local police two weeks ago for complete data of bank robberies.

They said the FIA had written letters to the city police chief, the CID chief and the head of the Anti-violent Crime Unit, asking them to provide details of bank heists and suspects involved in such incidents.

However, the sources said, the office of the CCPO told FIA officials through a letter that the request for intelligence data should have been routed through the FIA headquarters in Islamabad.

Similarly, they said, the chief of the AVCU also informed the FIA that the unit dealt only with kidnapping for ransom cases and had nothing to do with bank robberies.

The sources said the CID did not even bother to give a reply.

They said a proper and effective investigation had never been conducted in any bank robbery case, though private security guards, posted at the looted banks, were involved in 12 out of 21 robberies committed in Karachi during 2007.

The sources said the FIA investigators also did not rule out the possibility of induction of operators of Al Qaeda and the Taliban into security agencies as guards.