LAHORE, Nov 2: The Federal Investigation Agency is facing problems in registering cases against those human traffickers, who have saved their skin by paying money back to the complainants during inquiry.

“Even the complainants are now least interested in getting the smugglers booked after receiving their money,” according to the officials of the FIA.

In some cases, they said, the complainants did not go by the text of their complaints and withdrew their applications against the culprits.

They said the FIA could not keep them (human smugglers) behind bars without the help of complainants. “A number of complaints against the human smugglers are not converted into FIRs because of this reason,” they said.

They said more than 70 complaints against human smugglers were disposed of at the inquiry stage while only two per cent of the remaining (which were converted into cases) were decided against them due to discrepancy in law.

The FIA officials demanded amendments to the Immigration Ordinance, 1979, regarding action against the victims, who did not stand firm against the alleged human smugglers. They also sought the removal of the provision of bails to the accused after paying the looted money back to the victims.

The FIA’s inability to get the human smugglers booked has been shown in three recent cases.

Muhammad Imran, 25, a resident of Mandi Bahauddin, was one of the 23 people whose bodies were recovered from a sea in Greece last month. All of them were Asians and drowned when their boat capsized while entering Greece.

As many as 11 of them were identified as Pakistanis. Of them, the bodies of six reached the Punjab last month.

The FIA officials told this reporter that the family of Imran, which had earlier submitted an application against a human smuggler of their locality, withdrew it when he paid them twice the amount their son had given to him for arranging his journey.

Shafqatullah Butt, a former employee of the Pakistan Railways, who has reportedly sent a number of people abroad, especially to Greece, Turkey and Italy, in connivance with the FIA officials and the immigration authorities at airports, was arrested on the complaint of two victims.

However, he managed to escape punishment by paying about Rs1 million to the complainants.

Similarly, three men, who were offloaded from a Canada-bound flight at Lahore airport a couple of months ago, had given a statement in court against notorious human smuggler Malik Bashiruddin.

They alleged that Bashir had taken about Rs5 million from them to prepare fake documents. They withdrew the case against Bashir when he returned their money.

However, the agency claimed that it did not let him succeed in getting bail from the Lahore High Court despite the withdrawal of the case by the victims.

When contacted, a senior FIA official said the agency would give written recommendations to the interior ministry to address these problems.

He said an amendment should be made to the immigration ordinance to punish the people, who paid hundreds of thousands of rupees to “travel agents” to reach Europe and the US.

“People will not take risk of travelling on fake documents when they realize that they will be punished as well, if they fail in their attempt,” he maintained.

He said the law should also address the problem of easy bail given to the accused following the return of money to the victims. Few human smugglers were given punishments due to loopholes in the law.

The FIA official said recovering looted money from the human smugglers, which had apparently become a hallmark of the FIA’s performance, should not be given much credit. “To get the human smugglers punished from court should be one of the prime objectives of the agency,” he added.