ISLAMABAD, June 17: Interpol has issued ‘red warrants’ for 22 human smugglers of Pakistani origin.
Director-General of the Federal Investigation Agency Tariq Pervez informed Dawn that 15 officers of his agency had been arrested and 50 low-ranking officials sacked on charges of helping traffickers.
“Interpol was requested to arrest 22 human smugglers who had escaped and settled abroad following crackdown by FIA on agents involved in human smuggling,” the DG said.
He said the Frontier Corps (Balochistan) and Coast Guards were responsible for keeping an eye on the land and sea routes used for smuggling people, whereas the agency’s job was to arrest people involved in human smuggling and bringing them to justice.
The FIA has established a checkpoint at Chaman which was being manned by five FIA personnel, he said. He said the only way to determine the extent of human smuggling was to look at the number of people arrested in foreign countries and handed over to the Pakistani authorities for deportation.
The DG claimed that there were less than one per cent of such people who had gone abroad from Islamabad, Karachi and Peshawar airports.
Around 13,300 illegal Pakistani immigrants were deported from Europe in 2005 and 5,165 in 2006. He acknowledged that there had been a slight increase in 2007 and 5,300 people had been deported from different European countries so far.
The DG admitted that some times FIA faced problems in apprehending human smugglers because of lack of evidence. Citing an example, the DG said that after the death of an illegal immigrant in Greece, FIA tried to arrest the agent in Pakistan who had sent the man abroad but his relatives did not help the authorities because the agent had promised to the family to send their younger son to Europe.
The DG said that in one incident nearly 10 people had been pushed into the open sea by a gang of human smugglers to reduce the weight of an overloaded boat going to Oman.
The DG said that in order to check human smuggling, the FIA had formed an Inter-Agency Task Force.
Regarding human trafficking to Saudi Arabia in the garb of Mehrams for pilgrims, the DG said that only one such case had been detected and the two persons involved in the incident had been arrested.
