Cashing in heavily on the much-touted term of human rights, the culprit was able to amass funds
THE shocking case of a scam committed by the coordinator of the Pakistan chapter of the International Human Rights Commission, an NGO, has left several foreigners stranded in Lahore. On the pretext of organizing a human rights’ conference, the credit of devising the entire scheme goes to Dr Muhammad Shahid Amin Khan, the chief manipulator and coordinator of the fictitious conference, who is suddenly nowhere to be found! The matter is being probed by the Home Department to establish Dr Khan’s misdemeanour.
Cashing heavily on the much-touted term of HR, it is a classic case of misusing an NGO to amass funds. The global pull that the term invokes has been cleverly put to successful test by Dr Shahid Amin Khan, the self-styled world chairman of the International Human Rights Commission. The embassies of the five foreigners, fraudulently invited to assist Dr Shahid Khan in organizing the conference on human rights to be held in Lahore, have asked the Home Department to locate the whereabouts of the offender. “He has just vanished into thin air! There’s no trace of him,” said Vincent Mas, the cultural attache of Spain.
Mr Mas revealed that he received a call from a girl who had travelled all the way from Madrid to work on a three-month contract for Dr Shahid Amin. “She told me how she had been deceived into coming to Pakistan. The reason why she answered Shahid Amin’s Internet advertisement was to get a chance to work in Pakistan and make some money. The guy promised that each month all the five foreign nationals would get $1,500 and he would also take care of boarding and lodging,” said Vincent Mas. Two girls, one from France and the other from Portugal, share the 25-year-old Spanish girl’s predicament. The fourth person who fell for Dr Shahid Amin’s ploy is a 32-year-old Mexican, Daniel. All of them are down and out with no money to see them through this difficulty. “I thought that since I’ll be making $1,500 a month I need not take extra cash,” said the Spanish girl.
On January 5, 2004, an advertisement was posted on the Internet and translated simultaneously into different languages by many websites. One of them was www.hacesfalta.org in Spanish, inviting young, ambitious people to take ‘action across borders’ by helping in organizing a high-profile international conference on human rights to be held from March 31 to April 7, 2004, in Lahore. The two other websites used ingeniously to post the conference’s agenda were, www.idealist.org and www.geocities.com. On April 7, 2003, Dr Shahid announced in his policy statement that the IHRC will be hosting a five-day world conference on human rights and peace. He stated that it will be held from March 31-April 7, 2004, whose main secretariat will be in Lahore and Karachi, with other offices to be set up in New York, Rome, Paris, London, Dubai, Toronto and Johannesburg.
To give credence to such high claims, Dr Khan went a step further in making the invitation more attractive. Illustrious names, such as the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Dr Boutros-Boutros Ghali; former secretary general of the Organization of Islamic Conference, Dr Hamid Al Ghabid and former President of Iran, Hashmi Rafsanjani were added to the introductory note posted on the website. In his list of invitees, the IHRC chief also included the names of the US President and Vice-President, George Bush and Dick Cheney; President of Libya, Moammer Qaddafi; Prime Minister of Pakistan Zafarullah Khan Jamali; President of Iran, Khatami and names of several world leaders.
“When we arrived in Islamabad, Shahid Amin told us in person that all those people had given their consent to attend the conference. He told us that the inaugural session would be attended by President Pervez Musharraf. He said that the conference’s main objective was to modify the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights and was an extension to the 1993 Vienna conference on human rights,” said Daniel.
Excited at the prospect of meeting world renowned dignitaries, the Spanish girl and the young man from Mexico landed at the Islamabad airport to be personally received by the mastermind of the imaginary conference on human rights. Two days later, Dr Shahid Amin brought them to Lahore and introduced them to the French and Portuguese girls. “We were put up in a hotel in Gulberg. The manner in which he was operating made me very uneasy. The next morning, I asked him about signing the three months contract, but he kept on postponing. A few days later, he said that President Musharraf was not able to attend the conference and a new date had to be decided,” explained the Spanish girl.
For the moment, President Musharraf’s unavailability card in rescheduling the conference comforted the foreign volunteers. To keep them unsuspected and raise funds, Dr Shahid Amin arranged meetings of his European human rights workers with various politicians and provincial ministers. “He took us to the provincial finance minister’s house. We also met the minister for agriculture and several politicians,” said Daniel. Whenever necessary, Dr Shahid Amin produced his fake identification card to prove that he was a former UN diplomat and that the IHRC was an approved body of the United Nations. On March 3, Dr Shahid Amin made his final exit from the scene and disappeared. He was untraceable till the filing of this report. After the initial investigation of the Home Department’s foreigners and visa section, it was revealed that the IHRC did exist and was based in Dubai. Dr Shahid Amin used to work there, but had left it two years back to establish its Pakistan chapter in Islamabad and Lahore. “We don’t know what we are going to do now. Shahid Amin’s fraud has really shaken our trust,” said the Spanish girl. It was not essential to add they could no longer trust another Pakistani.
