A vengeful man who faked his own death to claim $500,000 (BD188,500) in life insurance has lost his final appeal against a 10‑year prison sentence.
Last year, the High Criminal Court convicted the 44‑year‑old Pakistani man, along with his wife and brother, of colluding to forge his death certificate and steal the insurer’s funds.
The 46-year-old brother, a Bahraini citizen, was also sentenced to 10 years in prison, while the man’s wife was sentenced to a year in jail, after attempting to collect the insurance payout.
Yesterday, the Cassation Court rejected the final appeal of all three convicts, whose attempted fraud was described in the initial ruling as a ‘diabolical conspiracy’.
Judges upheld the prison time, a BD2,000 fine and an order to pay BD5,001 as temporary compensation to the GCC-based insurance firm, while civil court litigation for damages continues. The court had also earlier ordered the deportation of the couple back to Pakistan after completing their sentences.
In December, the trio appealed to the Supreme Criminal Appeals Court to contest their sentences, but were unsuccessful.
Judges previously heard that the scheme was motivated by revenge, after the main suspect’s former employer – the insurance firm – allegedly failed to pay his wages for more than six months.
The plot was unravelled when the firm hired detectives from a world-famous American agency, Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, to find out if the man had really died.
The story, as previously reported in the GDN, began in April 2023, when the 44-year-old Pakistani visited the insurer’s headquarters to obtain a life insurance policy, designating his wife as the beneficiary.
Four months after the policy was purchased, the insurance firm received a letter from an intermediary firm stating that the man had died – with two documents attached, including a death certificate.
Copies of the purportedly authenticated death certificate were attached to the case files, with official stamps from Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry and consulate in Karachi, and the Pakistani Embassy.
The attempted fraud came to light as the insurance company ‘sensed something suspicious’ about the claim and hired private investigators – the Pinkertons – to ‘get to the bottom of the matter’.
Investigators visited the man’s hometown in Karachi and interviewed his sons, neighbours and even local gravediggers and a mosque imam and concluded that he was never buried, and was still alive.
It later appeared that the wife falsely claimed her husband died of a heart attack at home in Karachi and that local authorities took her word for it. Then, she returned to Bahrain to execute the rest of the plan.
The verdict recounted how the older brother, the Bahraini citizen, obtained forged documents and arranged for their authentication by official bodies to make the death appear as an ‘indisputable fact’.
The wife used the verified certificate to lodge the claim with the European insurer and filed a lawsuit in court, even obtaining a court order decreeing that she should be awarded the money.
Following investigations, Pakistani authorities eventually located the man, after he signed a lease for a flat under his legal name. He was arrested, reportedly admitted to the plot and confessed to paying bribes to help his plan proceed smoothly.
The GDN earlier reported that a third brother appeared before judges claiming that the 44-year-old appellant was actually dead and that the defendant was another sibling.
The court later heard that their Bahrain-based brother had been overheard by co-workers suggesting that others commit life insurance fraud, after bragging that he had pulled it off successfully.
In the original High Criminal Court verdict, judges used striking language, branding the plot ‘devilish’ and stating that the suspects ‘wove a diabolical conspiracy with great cunning’.
“The defendants thought their scheme was air-tight and that the law would not catch up to them when they tried to blot out the hallmarks of their crime,” read the verdict. “It was a scheme orchestrated with extreme precision, planned for with devilish rigour and executed by individuals who had no fear of the law.”
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
&uuid=(email))