December 01, 2006	Friday	Ziqa'ad 9, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, Nov 30: A ‘departmental inquiry’ launched by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to catch human traffickers in its ranks looks more like a cover up.

Only a woman ASI and a driver of FIA’s immigration staff at the Islamabad airport are being investigated on the charge while their allegedly more culpable colleagues have not been touched, insiders confided to Dawn.

FIA instituted the ‘departmental inquiry’ after the Inter- Service Intelligence (ISI) found that FIA’s immigration staff at the country’s international airports had let 800 Bengalis enter Pakistan illegally in the recent past.

ISI came to the conclusion while investigating last April’s attack on Sunni Tehrik’s public meeting in Karachi. The suicide bomber who allegedly caused the devastation was identified as an illegal Bengali immigrant.

Forced to identify the black sheep in its ranks, FIA bosses picked up a woman ASI for clearing two Bengalis and a driver for transporting them to Rawalpindi railway station to board a train to Karachi.

Since at least seven other FIA immigration officers known to have cleared even more - up to 150 - Bengalis, it appeared that the woman ASI and the driver were being made scapegoats, their colleagues observed.

Assistant Director Choudhary Zulfikar, one of the officers investigating the case, when contacted, said: “We wrote to Pakistan High Commission at Dhaka eight or nine times to verify the visas which they had issued. When a response is received we will be able to decide some action against other FIA officials.”

About the driver and the female ASI, he said the driver was arrested “red handed” trying to clear three Bengalis at Islamabad airport with the help of some seniors. The female official was arrested as she was in touch with the driver, he said.

That fits in Pakistan’s bureaucratic culture where the buck never stops at the top and wrongdoings of higher ranks are overlooked, or worse blamed on the low rankers, the colleagues said.

They said a reprieve granted by President Pervez Musharraf to woman prisoners came to the rescue of the woman ASI and she was set free on bail. But the driver, being lowest in rank, remains in the custody by FIA without being charged and sent for trial.

In the case of one FIA employee, even being found not guilty by the court proved no help.

Officer Rizwan Aslam was arrested and tried on the charge of human trafficking in 2005. But the Lahore High Court found that he was not the one who had helped passengers to travel abroad on fake documents and declared him innocent.

His pleas with the FIA bosses to reinstate him have gone unheard.