November 15, 2003	Saturday	Ramazan 19, 1424

KARACHI, Nov 14: Another 605 job seekers arrived here on Friday by a cargo launch, taking the total of Pakistanis deported from Muscat during the current year to more than 3,000.

All of them had been smuggled to the Gulf state through Taftan, crossing the Pak-Iran border illegally near Mand Ballu. The job-seekers, most of them illiterate, paid the human traffickers different amounts ranging from Rs5,000 to Rs25,000.

A flock of 727 deportees had returned on Oct 30 from Muscat, followed by 774 others in late August. At least 1,000 more are expected to be deported soon.

Their dirt-covered bodies were telling a lot about their plight in the prisons, where they were kept for several days before being deported by a 100-by-30 feet launch, which had only one lifeboat with a maximum capacity for eight people.

The Pakistani captain of the vessel, Al-Qadri, owned by a Dubai-based shaikh, told Dawn that the Muscat authorities had provided 8,400 loaves and 1,440 tins of beans for the deportees’ three-day voyage.

The job seekers, most of them bare-footed, had no personal belongings or documents with them, except the emergency passports issued by the Pakistani mission in Oman.

A team of the Immigration and Passport Circle staff was deployed at the Ghas Bandar immigration checkpoint, where the deportees were given food and water by the Ansar Barney Trust.

Mohammed Sajjan Noonari, a 20-year-old villager from Larkana, was the only job seeker who was matriculate. He claimed to have paid an Irani human trafficker, Maula Bux, Rs15,000 at Mand Ballu.

He said: “I along with 19 others was crammed into a pick-up, which took us to an Iranian border town, Kunrag, after a two-day journey. We stayed overnight there and were taken to another town, Jashak, which took two days more.”

Noonari said the job seekers were then handed over to other agents, who took them to a jetty at Minab in their vehicles. “We were herded into a small launch which reached Khasab, Muscat, after a 10-hour voyage.”

The job seekers, he said, were arrested after they were abandoned by the launch crew. “We spent the night in the open and took to the road at dawn as we had no food or drinking water,” he said.

Noonari and his batch were arrested on Aug 30. They were taken to a police post where they were kept locked in a small room for two days. “We were sent to a jail in Khasab for 15 days and then shifted to the Sahaar jail, where we remained imprisoned for one month and 20 days,” he said.

According to the deportees, there are over 1,100 more Pakistani job seekers still confined in the Sahaar jail alone. “The conditions in the jails are miserable and the behaviour of the jail staff is horrible,” Mohammed Ishaq Rind, a 25-year-old man from Shahdad Kot said.

Rind, who was an ice cream vendor, said the jail authorities did not provide any medicines to the sick. “Instead we were beaten whenever we requested for medicines,” he said.

He said there was only one lavatory and one bathroom in the jail and a queue of over 50 inmates usually remained waiting in front of the two facilities for their turn.

Mohammed Nawaz, 43, who hailed from Sialkot, said ordinary things were being sold at exorbitant prices, which worsened the the situation in the jail.