October 11, 2006	Wednesday	Ramazan 17, 1427

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

PESHAWAR, Oct 10: An inquiry against former immigration staff deputed at the Peshawar International Airport in the year 2002 has been reopened to find officials responsible for letting over a hundred Pakistani drug smugglers to travel to Kuwait on forged passports.

Abdul Qadeer Bhatti, Regional Director, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), confirmed on Tuesday that the Deputy Director (passport), Shaukat Hayat, had been asked to conduct a fresh inquiry and find guilty officials in the FIA immigration.

In the year 2002 and early 2003 about 120 Pakistanis were arrested by law-enforcement agencies at the Kuwait airport on the charges of smuggling heroin from Pakistan.

Most of them had boarded flights at the Peshawar international airport on passports with changed photographs. Five of them were executed late last year and one in May this year.

According to sources, some widows of the executed Pakistanis had written a joint letter to the Director General, FIA, Tariq Pervez, last month and asked him to restart an inquiry against the FIA immigration staff posted at the Peshawar airport in the year 2002 and early 2003.

These widows stated in their letter that their husbands were executed as they were allowed by the FIA to catch planes on the forged documents. They claimed that the FIA staff was equally responsible for the crime their late husbands committed.

These sources said that Mr Tariq Pervez sent the same letter to FIA Regional Director Abdul Qadeer Bhatti and asked him to re-launch the inquiry.

Deputy Director (passports) Shaukat Hayat in his previous enquiry had failed to fix responsibility on any of the immigration officials, the sources added.

Mr Shaukat had left some snags in his previous enquiry report, Mr Bhatti said. Now, he was conducting the enquiry again to fill in several questions he had left blank previously.

Official sources told Dawn that a joint interrogation team of FIA and Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) had been formed in March this year after the visit of two senior officials from both the departments and one from the Immigration and Passport department to Kuwait. The three officials interrogated Pakistani prisoners in Kuwait.

According to sources, the Kuwaiti law-enforcement authorities had also handed over forged passports with original names of the Pakistani prisoners to the three-member team to help them in their investigations.

The FIA Headquarters in Islamabad had given the task to Deputy Director (Passport) Shaukat Hayat to conduct an inquiry into the case.

He was also handed over the passports of the executed drug traffickers with their original names and addresses to the senior official.

However, Mr Hayat completed his inquiry without fixing responsibility on any of the immigration officials, these sources said.

In his report, Mr Shaukat Hayat blamed the immigration officials at the Peshawar airport for not cooperating with him and intentionally avoiding to provide details about their staff on the day when these executed Pakistanis got flights to Kuwait.

According to these sources, some FIA officials, who were posted at the Peshawar airport in 2002 and early 2003, were again working on their former positions and might be creating hurdles to complete the inquiry, these sources said.

But, sources said, if the joint interrogation team of the ANF and FIA checked the exact date of their departure from the lists of different government agencies, those officials who were on duty could be identified.