Lahore police announce arrests in mugging case involving Bitcoin

LAHORE: Police on Thursday claimed to have made arrests in a mugging case involving payment of Rs14.7 million through a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, ARY NEWS reported.

According to details, the police after an initial probe claimed that they had arrested the drivers of the vehicles and travel agents who were involved in looting two foreigners after taking them to an undisclosed location.

The vehicles used in the incident were hired on rent, and the police have taken them into their custody. “An accused who portrayed himself as a journalist during the entire mugging episode is also arrested,” they said.

The police, however, said that the prime suspect in the case, identified as Rana Irfan Mahmood, is still at large. “We have also approached IT experts for recovery of looted Bitcoin currency,” they said.

According to a report a day before, two foreign nationals, one from Switzerland and the other from Germany were deprived of millions of rupees in Lahore, the provincial capital of Punjab.

A first information report (FIR) registered on the complaint of an Islamabad resident identified the prime accused as Irfan Mahmood, who invited the foreigners, a Swiss man and a German woman, to Lahore.

It further read that the accused along with his accomplices took the foreign nationals from a hotel where they were staying after arrival in Lahore to an undisclosed location with their eyes covered with a piece of cloth.

The police said that one of the accused sprinkled heroin powder on the clothes of Stephan Ehrhardt, a German foreigner and threatened to lodge a drug case against them.

The accused then blackmailed them into transferring 6,300 euros and 1.86 Bitcoin worth Rs14.7 million into his account. As per FIR, the accused with help of a fake press team also recorded a video of foreigners and blackmailed them of transferring Rs300million more into their account.