Another Jeweller targeted

A brutal home invasion that saw three men hold the jewellery store owner and his family hostage this week comes as a fourth such robbery attempt in the area where jewellery store owners have been the target.

Zia Muhammad arrived home with groceries around 8 p.m. last Wednesday when he was targeted by three men who came at him from inside his house. The robbers swarmed Muhammad and his father, smashing the owner of JV Jewellers over the head with the butt of a gun. They began beating Muhammad until he fell on the floor and then tied up his hands and took him downstairs, Zia Muhammad  told a leading TV channel.  They broke his nose and cut away his jacket and part of his shirt with knives, he said. The intruders kept asking for the keys or passwords to enter Muhammad’s Airport Road jewelry store, but he said he was so panicked — and the security so complicated — that he didn’t trust himself to give them the correct information. They had already told him that his nine-year-old son was tied up upstairs and that if the passwords  did not work, they would kill the boy, he said.

“I break down,” Muhammad has been quoted by the channel. His 74-year-old father recently had a pacemaker installed. Muhammad’s son and his mother were tied up upstairs. All he could do was hope that his wife would come into the driveway and call police to say that something was wrong, he said. Instead, his wife walked inside with his two daughters. All three were bound and taken downstairs, he said. “When I saw my wife is trapped, I just give up everything,” he said. “Hopeless, helpless.”

The intruders became preoccupied with Muhammad’s family and he said that he used the moment to run up the stairs and get outside. His hands were still tied behind his back, his face covered in blood, and he could not properly knock on a neighbour’s door.

Only one person opened their door to him, he said, because they were all afraid of the blood. “And I said, ‘I need help, please, help. My family is held up at gunpoint,” he said. Police was called by the neighbours.