ISLAMABAD, Feb 21: Security agencies have arrested a man accused of being the leader of a network involved in smuggling hundreds of people to Greece and other European countries, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao said on Tuesday.

The man was arrested in Gujrat this week, the minister told a regional conference on combatting illegal human trafficking. He said the government was pursuing the man’s son and other members of his network operating in Turkey and Greece.

Tariq Pervez, director general of the Federal Investigation Agency, said the son was living in Istanbul. He said the father, who was arrested on a police charge but has yet to be formally charged in court, had been running the network for the past decade.

“During interrogation he has revealed that he had smuggled around 500 people to Greece alone,” Mr Pervez told Reuters.

The father was arrested on information from a Pakistani who was arrested in Athens while trying to illegally enter Greece through treacherous snowy mountains, Mr Sherpao said.

Mr Pervez said it was difficult to say how many Pakistanis were still smuggled to Gulf and European countries. But he said about 20,000 Pakistani illegal migrants were deported from Oman, Iran and other countries in 2005 alone.

Every year, thousands of women and girls are trafficked through or within the Pakistan to work as prostitutes or servants to Europe and Gulf.

Small Pakistani boys are smuggled to the Middle East and forced to work as jockeys in camel races, while adults are taken there as bonded or domestic labour.

The UN-affiliated International Organisation for Migration, which organised the conference in Islamabad, says political instability and difficult socio-economic conditions provide the impetus for the trafficking business to flourish.

In December, the government chalked out a national plan to combat human trafficking that seeks to integrate the efforts of governmental and non-governmental agencies.

Pakistan was removed from a US State Department human trafficking watch list in June because of its efforts to stop it and is now seen as a country that is tackling the problem but which could do more. —Reuters