October 06, 2008	Monday	Shawwal 06, 1429

LAHORE, Oct 5: Governments of Turkey, Iran and Oman have asked Pakistan to take ‘strict measures’ to control human smuggling.

A source in the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) told Dawn on Sunday that these countries were perturbed over the increase in human trafficking from Pakistan and had stressed Islamabad to do the needful.

“Since the FIA is utilising its energies more on investigating terrorism incidents and measures to check the (rising) trend, human trafficking has gone down on the priority list,” he maintained.

In the forthcoming meeting of the working group of four nations -- Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece -- Islamabad will have to defend its case by explaining the measures it has adopted to check human smuggling.

FIA Director-General Tariq Pervaiz was not available for a comment over the issue.

More than 4,000 Pakistanis have been deported from Turkey and Iran this year so far while several thousands are reportedly languishing in their prisons.

On the first day of Eid, nearly 600 Pakistanis were deported from Oman while their total number this year has been in thousands.

So much so, some 13 Pakistanis lost their lives a couple of months ago while trying to enter Greece via Turkey.

Besides, among the deported persons especially from Turkey are over a dozen teenagers that shows agents even do not hesitate luring them. In such cases, FIA holds parents responsible for that because their children cannot arrange the amount on their own to pay to agents.

Asim Sharif, 30, of Gujrat, who was recently deported from Turkey told FIA that he had paid Rs500,000 to a local agent for arranging his journey.

“The agent took me to Quetta by a land route from where a group of nine others and I entered Iran. From there the agent handed us over to another person believed to be an Iranian who arranged a ferry for us and we set off to Turkey. After reaching there, we encountered a group of coastguards who tried to stop us. But we preferred jumping into the sea. After a while they managed to catch us, took us to a detention cell and kept us for a month or so to interrogate our possible links with ‘terrorists’ before deporting us back home.”FIA assistant-director (Gujranwala division) Arif Bokhari told Dawn that most of the deported persons either from Iran or Turkey this year belonged to Mandi Bahauddin, Gujrat, Hafizabad and Narowal.

“There has been no industry in Mandi Bahauddin and fan and timber industries in Gujrat have been shifted to Chiniot prompting the youth of the areas to pay handsome sum of money to agents to leave for greener pastures.”

He said organised networks had been working in this belt and an agent usually charged between Rs300,000 and 500,000, to arrange the journey of an aspirant to Greece via Iran and Turkey through land route.

“We call local agents as facilitators,” Mr Bokhari said and maintained that the agency had managed to arrest at least 39 ‘notorious’ human traffickers whose names were in the red book besides arresting 300 ‘agents.’ Last year, he said 350 suspected human smugglers were convicted.

“Since Gujrat is a prime place where a number of human traffickers have been operating the FIA is pondering to set up a separate cell there,” he added.

However, an agent reportedly charges between Rs15,000 and Rs30,000 from an aspirant for arranging his travel to Oman.