WASHINGTON, Aug 5: The US government is reconsidering its decision to send hundreds of Pakistani detainees home on chartered flights, US and Pakistani officials told Dawn on Monday.

After consulting the Pakistan embassy in Washington, the Immigration and Naturalization Service of the US government had earlier agreed to charter flights to return all the detainees who had been languishing in American jails for months.

The first chartered flight arrived in Pakistan on June 27 with 131 prisoners. The deportation cost INS more than $700,000 including $342,000 they paid to a Portuguese airlines, Air Luxor, for the plane.

The move, however, caused uproar both in Pakistan and the United States where the media described it as forced deportation of helpless immigrants.

In Pakistan, the media criticized the government for failing to get a better deal for the deportees most of whom wanted to stay back in the United States.

Consequently, both the US and Pakistani governments postponed their plans to send more chartered flights.

The US authorities are still holding 294 Pakistanis for deportation. “All of them have lost their appeals against the deportation order and have to be sent home now,” says Imran Ali, a Pakistani diplomat who has been looking after the detainees since Sept 11, when the first arrests were made.

Ali says that since the Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the authorities have launched two separate campaigns for catching illegal immigrants. The first campaign — that continued from Sept 11 to Nov 30 — was aimed at catching suspected terrorists.

During the first campaign US security officials arrested 1,200 people, mostly Muslim youths. They included 280 Pakistanis, 74 Egyptians and 21 Indians. In a meeting with the former Pakistani ambassador to Washington, Maleeha Lodhi, US officials acknowledged that they had targeted Muslim youths because all 19 hijackers who caused the Sept 11 tragedy were young Muslim men.

Although all of them were Arabs, the Pakistanis topped the list of the detainees. “Mainly because they were socially more active than other Muslim immigrants and also because many of them did not have legal papers,” said Ali.

US officials say that most of the Pakistani immigrants arrested after the Sept 11 terrorist blitz were those who either had criminal records or had been involved in brawls with other groups. Some others were those who were already known to the INS as immigration violators.

“A small group was of those students who had changed their colleges without informing the INS,” said Ali. After 9/11, the INS was looking particularly for such students, as some of the hijackers were also students who kept changing their colleges without informing the immigration officials.

Among the 1,200 suspects held, the INS short-listed 170 people as “material witnesses,” a term used to define people who could provide information about the hijackers and other suspects. Only one of them — Fahd Rashid — was a Pakistani.

His family lived in Qatar and he has a Pakistani father and a Qatari mother. He was arrested because he used to frequent a shop in Florida where one of the hijackers — Mohammed Ata — also shopped. Once he went to the shop 90 minutes after Ata for photocopying some documents.

“He was caught as much for his appearance as for any other reasons,” said Ali who held several meetings with Rashid in the prison. “He had enigmatic eyes and a foot-long beard.”

He was sent back to Qatar after the embassy learned that the INS had no evidence of his involvement in terrorist activities. After consulting Rashid, the embassy requested US officials to arrange his deportation.

Of 280 Pakistanis caught after 9/11, only 12 were bailed. The rest were all repatriated. Seven others also had applied for political asylum after their arrests but their applications have been rejected and they also are awaiting their deportation.

The deportation started slowly, with small groups of Pakistanis returning home on commercial flights.

“So the Pakistan embassy offered its services and we made special arrangement for our officials to accompany the Pakistani immigrants,” says Ambassador Lodhi.

“And I must say that Imran Ali did a superb job. He visited each and every detainee, made all the arrangements and often accompanied them all the way to Pakistan.”

But this was a very slow process. Even those detainees who had already agreed to go home were forced to stay in prison for months waiting for their turn,” says Ali.