ISLAMABAD, Oct 17: The government has decided to register 1.5 million illegal immigrants in Karachi by March 2004 in a bid to improve the law and order situation and cleanse the city of criminals operating in the guise of illegal aliens.

“The National Alien Registration Authority has so far registered 35,000 illegal immigrants in Karachi but now the federal government has decided to register roughly a million to 1.5 million such aliens within the next four to five months”, Interior Minister Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat said on Friday.

He said that adequate financial and technical assistance would be provided to the Sindh government to get the illegal foreign nationals to register in Karachi as quickly as possible.

“The cabinet, in its meeting on Wednesday last, gave very clear directives to the Sindh government to firmly implement the plans to cleanse Karachi of illegal immigrants in the next five months “, he added.

He said Pakistan cannot afford the continued law and order problem in Karachi and that it was high time to flush out criminals operating in the guise of illegal immigrants.

The interior minister said that illegal immigrants belonging to Iran, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and some other countries would not be allowed to live in Pakistan anymore. “They are a security threat and the Sindh government will have to play an effective role to remove them from Karachi by all means”.

He said that the intelligence network was being strengthened throughout Pakistan to remove terrorism and sectarian violence.

The interior minister said that the army’s services would be acquired whenever and wherever needed to punish terrorists and hardened criminals. “But the cabinet did not feel it fit to seek the support of the army at this stage as we believe and hope that the police and civil armed forces can do the job”, he said.

Mr Hayat said that provinces need to improve their weak monitoring and surveillance systems to apprehend terrorists and those involved in sectarian violence.

“The new strategy has been finalised and discussed in the cabinet meeting to ensure better law and order situation in all the four provinces”, the interior minister said.

He said it was decided to convene a meeting of the political and religious leaders to improve the law and order situation. “But primarily we need the enforcement of laws which unfortunately is weak”, Mr Hayat said, adding that the achievement of peace across the country has been set as one of the major priorities of the government.

He said that banned sectarian parties, which were now operating under different names, would be the major target of the government.

The government, he said, was neither seeking nor had any collaboration with any country to eliminate terrorists and sectarian killers. Every thing, he said, was being done by the country’s security agencies.