Five days after an elderly American aid expert was kidnapped in Pakistan, police said Thursday they would carry out lie-detector tests on his staff in a desperate search for leads.
Warren Weinstein, 70, country director for US-based consultancy J.E. Austin Associates, was snatched by eight gunmen who tricked their way past his guards and forced his driver to wake him up before dawn on Saturday.
He was struck on the head with a pistol and driven off, apparently without witnesses, from his residence in Model Town.
Police have so far drawn a blank on who kidnapped him and why, other than concluding that he was targeted because of his nationality.
“We have decided to conduct lie-detector tests on the security guards and the driver to verify their statements given to investigators,” senior police official Atif Hayat told AFP.
“From today, we will start their screening. We are also interrogating the security company officials responsible for his security,” Hayat said.
“We are questioning all those who served at his office in the past,” he added.
The staff are under suspicion partly because Weinstein was taken just two days before he was due to leave Pakistan after seven years, raising the possibility that his movements may have been leaked to the kidnappers.
Police on Thursday released a sketch of one of the kidnappers, showing a man aged about 25 wearing a shirt with a mop of dark hair.
A senior Pakistani employee of J.E. Austin reiterated that the firm is increasingly worried about Weinstein’s health and searching for ways to inform the kidnappers about the medication he requires.
“We are in the dark. Nobody has contacted us. We are worried about his health and want to send the list of the medicines that Warren needs,” he said.
“We are constantly in touch with police. They told us they had taken another two people into custody,” he said.
The American lived in Model Town, an upmarket Lahore neighbourhood once home to former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, for five or six years, using the ground floor as an office and the first floor as a residence.
Weinstein had been due to return to the United States on Monday after concluding his contract on private-sector development and economic growth in Pakistan, a frontline state in the war on terror where anti-US feeling is rife.
