ISLAMABAD, Jan 4: A high-profile asylum-seeking family who were deported from Australia after a five-year battle arrived safely in Pakistan but have since disappeared, officials said Tuesday.

Mr Ali and Roqia Bakhtiari and their six children were flown to Islamabad late last week after Canberra, known for its tough, much-criticised stance on immigration, rejected their claims that they were ethnically-oppressed Afghans.

"A family deported from Australia arrived in Islamabad on Sunday," an immigration official said. "We allowed them go after someone furnished a personal guarantee that they would return for investigations," he said, but declined to identify the guarantor.

The official said the family 'might' have gone to Quetta but could not confirm that they had. The Bakhtiaris arrived in Australia in 1999 and became a symbol of the fight against the conservative government's policy of indefinite, mandatory detention for all unwanted asylum-seekers - a stance widely criticised by civil libertarians at home and abroad.

They lodged some 20 unsuccessful legal challenges for asylum, insisting they belonged to Afghanistan's ethnic Hazara community, a Shia minority oppressed by the former Taliban regime.

But Canberra said they were from Pakistan and attempts by officials and journalists to locate their claimed home community in Afghanistan failed. The Pakistani immigration official said the family's nationality could not be ascertained because they did not have any passports or identification papers when they arrived in Islamabad.

"The person who gave guarantee later took them to Flashman's Hotel in nearby Rawalpindi," he said. The whereabouts of the Bakhtiari family could not be traced immediately as the hotel staff said that Bakhtiaris came on Sunday, but were denied accommodation because they did not have passports or valid IDs.

The Bakhtiaris became a cause celebre in 2002 when their two eldest sons, Alamdar and Muntazar, escaped from a desert detention centre at Woomera in South Australia and sought refuge in the British consulate in Melbourne.

British authorities handed them back to the Australians. They took their case to the Court of Appeal in London, arguing British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw breached the European Convention on Human Rights in failing to protect them from inhumane and degrading treatment by Australian immigration authorities.

However, they lost that and other legal bids to stay and the government announced their impending deportation earlier this month despite recent suggestions from the Afghan embassy that Roqia Bakhtiari may have some relatives in Afghanistan. New Zealand also refused to take them. -AFP