Police said on Monday they have arrested a 65-year-old man accused of leading a gang of dacoits who were using rickshaws to rob traders in Karachi.
Police official Mumtaz Khan Marwat said Rahim Bakhsh, released from prison in 2018 after serving a 20-year sentence for a Rs7 million bank heist in 1998, had formed the “Rickshaw Gang” after completing his jail term. The operation in which Bakhsh was arrested in 1998 resulted in death of two policemen and his accomplices and injured Bakhsh, who then spent two decades in prison.
“Bakhsh formed his gang of four after his release from jail and started looting citizens. We arrested all gang members last night [Sunday] after a tip-off,” Marwat, who heads the Shah Latif Town police station, said.
The gang would target traders leaving cattle markets with large sums of cash, luring victims into their rickshaws or following them on the three-wheelers and then robbing them at gunpoint.
“Bakhsh, the ringleader, would wait at a destination to supervise the robberies and then flee in the same rickshaw with his men,” said Ihsanullah Khan, another police official who is interrogating the suspects.
“Bakhsh is a hardened criminal with several cases against him in the Karachi and Larkana divisions.”
Nearly 100 people have been killed during armed muggings in Karachi this year, according to police figures.