GUJRAT: The immigration authorities of the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Wednesday offloaded two passengers at the Sialkot International Airport for allegedly attempting to illegally migrate to Europe in the guise of Umrah pilgrims.

An FIA official told Dawn that passengers Hanzla and Zain Ali, both belonging to Sialkot, were travelling to Saudi Arabia on an Umrah visa.

However, the official claimed that during clearance, the immigration officials found both passengers to be ‘suspicious’. He claimed that upon further investigation, they were allegedly found connected with a Libya-based human trafficker named Ravi Masih.

He claimed that both passengers had struck a deal with the agent in exchange of Rs2.5 million each for sending them to Italy via Libya. The official said both passengers were later handed over to the Gujranwala FIA circle for further necessary action.

It is pertinent to mention that scores of the passengers are being offloaded daily from different flights out of Pakistan for the last few months.

A senior FIA official said that imposition of these restrictions and scrutiny of passengers had been paying dividends since no tragic incidents involving Pakistani immigrants had been reported in the last almost 11 months. He said that the last such incident occurred in the sea between Mauritania and Morocco in January 2025.

The FIA has identified several cities of Punjab, mainly in the Gujrat and Gujranwala regions, for profiling. Passengers between the ages of 15 to 40 years with certain destinations in Africa, Middle East and Central Asia are being profiled and stopped to stop illegal immigration and human trafficking.

However, businessmen, tourists, students and other categories of travellers have been facing difficulties due to these restrictions and there are complaints of passengers with valid documents being regularly offloaded.

Published in Dawn, December 18th, 2025