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| October 28, 2005 | Friday | Ramzan 23, 1426 |
Overseas job racket: two arrested
PESHAWAR, Oct 27: The passport cell of the Federal Investigation Agency on Thursday arrested two agents of an overseas employment agency and recovered 20 people whose travel documents were being prepared in the city, official sources told Dawn.
The FIA passport cell were tipped off about alleged illegal activities being carried out at the Shanda International Airways, an overseas employment promoter having an office in the Al-Shifa Plaza in Rawalpindi.
The agents picked these 20 people from different districts of the NWFP and Punjab for preparing their travel documents for Malaysia, sources said.
Two teams, one headed by Assistant Director Anti-Trafficking Unit Saleh Mohammad and the other by Assistant Director Passport Cell Ikhtiyar Gul, raided the Hayat Hotel and Hussain Plaza in Firdaus and arrested the two agents, Sayed Imtiaz Hussain, of Faisalabad, and Manzoor Ali of Swabi. A third agent managed to escape before the raid.
The FIA recovered 13 people from the Hayat Hotel and seven from the Hussain Plaza and took them to a police station in Hayatabad for interrogation.
The names of only 17 could be obtained. They are: Faisal Javed, Imtiaz Ali, Rameez Raja, Raja Mohammad Nusrat, Tajamal Mehmood, Ahmad Hasan, Shujaat, Amjad Ali, Nadeem Iqbal, Tahir Hussain, Fateh Ali, Zilat Khan, Aamir Shehzad, Raja Musarrat, Mohammad Tanweer, Mohammad Rashid and Sharafat Ali.
Accused Syed Imtiaz Hussain told FIA interrogators that he was working as a clerk at the Shanda International Airways owned by Malik Khalid Mehmood and Rana Shabbir and he had nothing to do with the illegal activities of the overseas employment promoter.
The officials said that Manzoor Ali was one of the agents working in Peshawar, while the overseas promoter had several sub-agents in the country who were fleecing innocent people with the promise that they would be sent abroad for jobs.
The 20 people in their statements recorded separately said that they had paid between Rs60,000 and Rs150,000 to the Shanda International Airways for jobs in Dubai.
They approached the overseas promoter after reading an advertisement which appeared in several newspapers regarding jobs in foreign countries, they added.
They said that however they did not pay the amount at the office in the Al-Shifa Plaza in Rawalpindi but were instead asked by the management to pay the money to different people at different locations of Rawalpindi.
They said that the overseas promoter’s management initially promised that all of them would be sent to Dubai for jobs. Later, they were told that it was difficult to provide them jobs in Dubai, so they would be sent to Saudi Arabia. But again the management changed plans and finally said that they would be sent to Malaysia.
FIA officials said that since all 20 of them had original Pakistani passports, therefore they were asked to go to Peshawar to the Bureau of Immigration and Overseas Employment for help. But all of them were apprehended before they could have their documents completed, they added.
The sources said that the overseas promoter had an agent in Malaysia namely Mehr Iftikhar and he had been given the task to accommodate all of them there.
The FIA Headquarters in Islamabad had been informed about the arrest of the two agents and they had ordered that the owners of the Shanda International Airways be arrested, they added.
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