RAWALPINDI, Aug 22: Around 199 Pakistanis are still languishing in the United States jails awaiting deportation, sources said here on Thursday.

A batch of 95 Pakistanis, including a woman, arrived here following their deportation from the US. This was the second batch of deportees to have arrived here.

Prior the arrival of the first batch of 132 Pakistanis on June 26, over 200 had been sent back on individual basis.

Of those arriving here (on Thursday) 14 had been convicted of various crimes and the rest were deportation absconders.

Of the convicted 14, four were involved in theft, two in sexual abuse, three in drugs, four had entered the US illegally, and another two had been convicted of other minor charges.

Around 50 of them had American wives and children. Sources, however, said, their families in the US can seek deportation waiver; American laws take a sympathetic view of such cases.

“All those who came today had got all chances of appeals before courts exhausted, and had the only option of either staying in the jails or going back to Pakistan,” a source said.

Of the 140 presented for the second deportation flight, 100 were Pakistanis, but five of them were granted stay by the courts.

“There was one case whose stay orders arrived when the plane had actually started moving, and he had to be returned. The guy wanted to go to Pakistan, but the court orders had to be obeyed,” the source said.

Three amongst the batch of 95 had been in jail for a period over six months and the rest remained incarcerated for 2-3 months.

The source said the US government has decided in principle to go soft on the overstay cases, but had no sympathies for those who had been declared deportation absconders, or had got their identities changed.

The US authorities, the source said, are convinced that these people are prone to terrorism. There are still around 5,000 Pakistanis in the US, who are deportation absconders, the source said.

The MD-11 World Airways Tri-Star plane on which the Pakistanis had been brought back had been chartered for around US$ 0.5 million. “The entire operation of collecting all these people from the detention centres spread all over the US must have cost the US authorities over a million dollars,” the source said.

The source divulged that the US authorities are starting fingerprinting of the passengers arriving in the US, who belong to a select group of 23 countries in which Pakistan is included.

The source warned that this may create problems for Pakistanis, who have changed their identities or possess multiple identities.

Ahsan Ali and Bashir Shah, two of the deportees, were full of complaints against their lawyers and said, they instead of helping their clients added to their miseries.

Javed Chaudhry, another deportee, said the New Jersey detention centre, where he had been kept, was terrible.

“We had to get drinking water from bathrooms and the sniffing dogs created problems for us,” he said.