In a peculiar incident, the entire staff of a fast-food joint in Lahore, Pakistan was arrested as they refused to provide free burgers to police officers.
All 19 staff members of ‘Johnny and Jugnu’ were taken into police custody on June 12 and were detained for seven hours after being repeatedly threatened by the police. They claimed that the officers were “harassing them, pushing them around, all for not giving them free burgers”, BBC reported.
“This is not the first time something like this has happened… at our restaurant,” a statement issued by the burger chain said.
According to the statement posted on Facebook, a group of police officers visited the restaurant two days before the incident and demanded free burgers.
“Upon rejecting their request for free burgers, which has become a common practice for them, the police officers threatened our managers and left, only to return the next day to further harass and pressurize our teams… with baseless arguments”, the statement read.
On June 11, the restaurant said that some officers came to their outlet and took the manager into custody without giving any reason.
Later, they emptied the entire branch, taking all of their crew and also the rest of the managers. The restaurant also added that the staff was not allowed to close down the kitchen leaving “fryers still running, customers waiting for their orders”.
In light of this incident, senior provincial police officer, Inam Ghani announced on Twitter that the nine officers involved in the incident have been suspended.
“No one is allowed to take the law into his own hands. Injustice will not be tolerated. All of them will be punished”, the officer said in his post.
Written by Kashish Tandon
