Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been stolen from three branches of the Afghan Millie Bank, a senior official said on Sunday. Several people have been detained on suspicion of complicity in the theft.
Mohibullah Safi, the bank’s chief, told Pajhwok Afghan News that a moneychanger had filched $200,000 from the bank’s branch in Kabul. But security forces had arrested the individuals who stood guarantee for the moneychanger.
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Without giving the number of the detainees, Safi said that a case against the accused was being investigated by the Attorney General Office. The case has been filed on the basis of investigations by the bank.
A bank employee, who did not want to be named, said the accused had a job in the bank's headquarters in Kabul. At the time of his appointment, the stealer’s mother -- a teacher by profession -- had offered a guarantee on his behalf.
He explained that under the recruitment rules, an appointee must produce a guarantee from a government employee, not a relative. But bank authorities were then unaware of his relationship to the guarantor, the source revealed.
Safi said that an amount of $250,000 had been pinched with the complicity of bank staff from Badakhshan and Kunduz branches. A delegation probed the issue and the findings were submitted to judicial organs, he said, adding that eight suspects had been arrested.
But an insider disclosed the bank’s branch in Badakhshan had been robbed of its entire deposits and Kunduz branch partially robbed. He said the investigators had shared their report only with the bank’s president in a furtive manner.
On the other hand, a spokesman for the Badakhshan governor, Abdul Rauf Rasikh, told Pajhwok that a sum of id="mce_marker"25,000 had been stolen from the bank’s provincial branch in Faizabad. He said five people, including four bank employees and a guard, had been held.