FAISALABAD, May 17: The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) claims to have arrested a human trafficker, Mohammad Yaseen.

FIA Deputy Director Rana Mohammad Iqbal newsmen that the FIA authorities had received a tip-off that an organized gang had been working in the city and its suburbs for the last many months and receiving huge amounts from people on the pretext of sending them abroad for employment.

He said that surveillance teams found that the gang had set up a recruitment office at Thikriwala and extorted money from a number of innocent people of the area.

The accused had also been publishing a newspaper by the name of ‘Fayyaz News’ to defraud people and blackmail the government functionaries into allowing them undue favours.

Rana Iqbal further said that the gang had deprived nine people of Rs11,22,000 on the pretext of sending them to Libya for employment. Some of them were actually smuggled to Libya but they were never provided jobs as promised and had to return to their homeland empty-handed.

He said that the Faisalabad FIA had already registered two cases against the gang under the Emigration Ordinance.