July 4, 2003	Friday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 3,1424

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LAHORE, July 3: As many as 119 Pakistanis being deported from Italy on different charges will reach Lahore by a chartered flight in the early hours of Sunday morning.

Some 125 Italian policemen will also accompany them in the plane for security reasons. The deportees also include those who were detained by the Italian government on suspicion of links with Al Qaeda.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has constituted four teams to interrogate the deportees. The teams under the supervision of FIA Deputy Director (IE&S) Chaudhry Tanvir Ahmed will take the deportees into custody on their arrival.

Mr Ahmed told Dawn on Thursday that the deportees who had gone to Italy on fake documents or wanted by any law-enforcement agency would be booked. He said there were also chances of tracking down some agent mafia rackets besides apprehending corrupt FIA officials through the deportees.

All the deportees reportedly are male and had been living in Italy for over a decade. Majority of them have cases of overstay against them.

The deportees are being sent direct to Lahore because most of them belong to the central and southern Punjab. A large number of their family members are expected to throng the airport.

The FIA officials say the deportation should be a lesson for those who pay hundreds of thousands of rupees to travel agents in a bid to slip away from the country, specially to Europe and the United States.

They say the people pay the amount to travel agents without any written assurances, and when they (the victims) lose money they have no proof, which also create problems for the agency to prosecute the culprits. They say the notion of once entering a developed country and making millions in few years thereafter is absolutely wrong.

The travel agents reportedly charge up to Rs1 million for the preparation of fake travel documents for entering Europe and the US.

The agents either prepare genuine documents with the connivance of the passport authorities or help their clients to clear all the immigration checks at the airport.

The travel agent mafia has been functioning smoothly without any let and hindrance both in central and southern Punjab. The FIA, however, has launched a crackdown on them in Gujrat, Gujranwala and Mandi Bahauddin divisions on numerous complaints by some residents. But it could only succeeded in nabbing a little over one dozen travel agents involved in the illegal activity.

The Federal Investigation Agency (Lahore wing) only managed to arrest 654 people for using fake and forged travel documents last year which also included those who were deported from other countries. The agency reportedly succeeded in detecting 25 per cent cases only.

According to the US State Department, the largest number of trafficked people are from Asia (with 225,000 from South East Asia and 150,000 from South Asia).