LOS ANGELES, Sept 21: The US Justice Department plans to fingerprint and track thousands more visitors when they arrive in the United States from a growing list of Middle Eastern countries, including Pakistan, officials at American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), quoting Justice Department sources said on Friday.

The programme, which began from Sept 11, targeting visitors from five countries, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, will be augmented from Oct 1 with 10 more Arab and Muslim countries, said Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the AILA.

The new expansion will also include Lebanon, Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, she said. The names of the other countries to be added were unavailable. The visitors will be fingerprinted and screened against terrorism and criminal databases, she quoted the federal officials as saying.

The expansion of the exit-entry programme — passed by Congress as a post-Sept 11 security measure — would impact hundreds of thousands of regular visitors into United States.

In 2000, there were 173,000 visitors to the United States from Iran, Lebanon, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, according to US Immigration and Naturalization Service statistics. Visitors data wasn’t immediately available for Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Yemen.

By 2005, visitors from all foreign countries — about 33.6 million people yearly — will be required to register and be fingerprinted, US Attorney General John Ashcroft has said. Even now, the system allows INS agents to fingerprint any visitor from any country who meets certain criteria, Jorge Martinez, a Justice Department spokesman, said on Tuesday. He wouldn’t say what those.

“Nothing is so surprising to our community any more,” said Imad Hamad, director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, based in Dearborn. “Fingerprinting, photos . . . these days, people are just waiting to hear what is next. It’s definitely ringing the bells of the past by having this community once again feel that it is still the prime suspect, and that the burden of the horrible attacks is still on our shoulders.”

Others said the programme’s expansion is a logical first step toward monitoring visitors and improving national security.

“The government has an obligation to taxpayers to deploy its resources in the most efficient way. Certainly, starting with those countries that have the greatest security threat is the beginning,” said Dan Stein, executive director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an anti-immigration lobbying group.