Cybercrime agency arrests schoolgirl's alleged blackmailer within 15 minutes

The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA) arrested a young man within 15 minutes of a school principal complaining about the alleged online harassment and blackmail of a schoolgirl, the agency told the Associated Press of Pakistan. The complaint was made during an E-Kachehri, an open session at which the agency hears public grievances.

According to APP, the principal raised the case with NCCIA Director General Syed Ali Nasir Rizvi during the session, and the suspect was arrested a quarter of an hour later. The report, filed on Thursday, did not name the school, the girl or the arrested man, and did not say where the arrest took place.

The same report said the agency had recorded 351 arrests in cases of harassment on social media. It gave no breakdown of those arrests by province, by the platform involved or by the type of complaint.

Separately, the Minute Mirror reported that NCCIA raids on four illegal call centres in Lahore and Karachi on Wednesday led to 89 further arrests. The agency's Lahore and Karachi circles carried out the operations, the paper said.

A spokesperson quoted by the Minute Mirror said the suspects had cheated foreigners by offering them telecom packages and phone upgrades. They also belonged to a network that took money after obtaining people's banking information through fraud, the spokesperson said. The agency's headquarters in Islamabad shared details of the operation, according to the report.

Neither report said whether the 89 arrests were counted within the 351 or were additional to it, and the NCCIA did not publish a consolidated figure in either account.

The NCCIA is the federal agency that investigates cybercrime, including online harassment, blackmail and financial fraud, and its E-Kachehri sessions are used to take complaints directly from the public. The two accounts describe activity on successive days: the call-centre raids on Wednesday and the E-Kachehri complaint that led to the arrest reported on Thursday.

Neither report named any of the 351 suspects or the 89 people held in the call-centre raids, and neither said whether any of them had been charged or produced before a court. Under Pakistani law, an arrest does not by itself establish guilt.