LAHORE: In a major breakthrough in the Rs1bn gold fraud case of Ichhra Bazaar, the police have reportedly arrested the suspect, a jeweller, from Islamabad and shifted him to an undisclosed location.
A police team was staying in Islamabad for the last 10 days or so when they got a tip-off that the suspect, Waseem Akthar, was hiding somewhere in the federal capital.
He was nominated in multiple FIRs lodged by his fellow jewellers besides his own stepmother.
The major fraud case surfaced in the second week of December 2025 when several jewellers of Madina Jewellers Market Ichhra after they came to know that Waseem had disappeared suddenly with 20kg of gold worth over Rs1 billion they had “invested” with him for decades.
The lockers of the suspect’s shop where they had deposited the gold ornaments were found unlocked at the time when the affected jewellers visited the premises.
An official, privy to the development, said the suspect kept on changing his location and the police finally managed to arrest him and his wife.
The official source claimed that the Lahore Police wanted to do the interrogation in their own style to ensure the maximum recovery of the gold he had made off with.
For this purpose, the police high-ups issued some instructions to keep the arrest secret, the source said. But the officers’ plan was spoiled when Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz on a social media platform claimed the suspect had been arrested.
The police source claimed that the offences/charges mentioned in the FIRs against the suspect as compared to his scale of crime were not strong enough to take him to the court of law for some major punishment. So the police officers decided to investigate the case ‘in a traditional way’ by interrogating the suspect without showing his arrest in the official record, the official claimed.
He added that the most concerning part of the case was that the suspect had reportedly sold everything, including his house, cars, and most probably the huge amount of the gold he had taken away.
As per the reports, an affected jeweller, Ahmad Siddiqui, told the police that he had handed over gold ornaments worth over Rs25m to Waseem Akhtar, the suspect who was the former president of Ichhra Jewellers Association. He said the suspect had been running his business, Madina Jewellers, for the last 35 years and had won the trust of the area jewellers. He said Waseem committed a criminal breach of trust, depriving dozens of his fellow jewellers of their valuables.
In another FIR lodged by a woman with the Ichhra Police Station told the police that the absconding suspect was her stepson and she had handed him over 2.5kg of her gold.
Meanwhile, the investigation wing police released a statement, announcing that Waseem Akthar had been arrested from Islamabad.
The police said he was nominated in multiple FIRs registered on the complaints of the affected jewellers of Ichhra market and further investigations were underway, refusing to share more details.
Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2026
