ISLAMABAD, May 13: The judicial magistrate, Sayed Muzaffar Ali Shah, on Monday awarded one year imprisonment to an Afghan national and his Saudi wife for illegally entering Pakistan.

The court order also instructed the Islamabad administration to ensure that the convicted couple was deported to their respective countries after the term of their imprisonment expired.

Mohammad Bakht, the Afghan national, and his Saudi wife Nauf had been arrested by the Kohsar police for their illegal entry into the country on January 17, this year. The couple with their six-month-old daughter were behind the bars since then. They were entitled to the benefit of section 382(b) of the CrPC which would include the term of their detention since their arrest into the period of imprisonment awarded on Monday.

Meanwhile, press reports stated that in fact they had been arrested by intelligence authorities much earlier and interrogated at a house in the residential sector of I/9 for several days on suspicion of their association with some terrorist network.

They, however, were not found involved in any terrorist activity by a joint intelligence team of Islamabad and as such they were handed over to the Kohsar police station which booked them under section 14 of the Foreign Act.

The Saudi Embassy in Islamabad had been trying to assist the Saudi woman to return to her home land. She, however, had submitted before the court that she intended to stay with her husband and did not wish to return to her homeland.