A vengeful employee, who faked his own death to claim life insurance money worth $500,000 (BD188,500), has lost an appeal against his 10-year prison sentence.
Describing the attempted fraud as a ‘diabolical conspiracy’, the High Criminal Court found the 44-year-old Pakistani man guilty in September of forging his death certificate and trying to steal the company’s money.
His 46-year-old accomplice and brother was also sentenced to 10 years in prison, while the man’s wife was sentenced to a year in jail, having tried to collect the insurance payout.
The three Pakistanis took to the Supreme Criminal Appeals Court to contest their sentences, but judges ruled to uphold the initial verdicts.
On top of the prison sentences, the court had fined the trio BD2,000, and required the brothers to pay temporary damages to the insurance company, which was also upheld by the appeals court.
The court also earlier ordered to deport the couple back to Pakistan after completing their sentence. The brother will remain in Bahrain as he has become a citizen.
Judges previously heard that the scheme was a way for the main suspect to exact revenge on his former employer, a GCC-based insurance firm, which had not paid 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.
In the original verdict, judges waxed poetic, branding the plot as ‘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.”
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 authenticated death certificate were attached to the case files, sporting 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 had not died.
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 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 raised a lawsuit in court, going so far to obtain a court order decreeing that she should be awarded the money.
Following concerted investigations, Pakistani authorities eventually caught up with the man alive and well and arrested him. The court heard that he admitted to the plot and confessed to paying bribes to help with his plan.
The GDN earlier reported that a third brother appeared before judges at court claiming that the 44-year-old appellant was actually dead and the defendant was another sibling.
The court later heard that their Bahrain-based brother had been overheard by co-workers suggesting to others to commit life insurance fraud after bragging that he had pulled it off successfully.
zainab@gdnmedia.bh
&uuid=(email))