KARACHI: A group of nearly 150 Pakistani nationals stuck at an airport in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang for the past four days amidst the coronavirus outbreak have appealed to the government in Islamabad to evacuate them back home.

The Pakistani citizens, most of whom are students, have been trapped at the airport in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, for several days as the death toll from the coronavirus outbreak spreading in China rose to 213 and the World Health Organisation called it a global health emergency.

They can neither leave the airport because many of them have reached the expiry of their visas, nor can they fly home due to Pakistan’s suspension of its flights to and from China in the wake of the outbreak.

Tariq Rauf, a PhD scholar from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Shangla district who was studying in China, in a video message sent to Dawn.com, said that members of the Pakistani community were stuck in Ürümqi because their flight to Pakistan had been cancelled.

With other Pakistani nationals and children appearing in the video, Rauf said the visas of many of them had expired and they were told to remain inside the airport.

“For how long will we stay here?” he questioned, adding that many people were already running out of money. He said Pakistani nationals had to fend for themselves while at the airport, sleeping on benches and purchasing food using their own money.

Rauf said Pakistani students were returning home after completing their degrees and they could not return to their universities because of the expiry of their visas and because they had handed over their accommodations to the varsities’ administrations. He said the uncertain situation was creating difficulties for them because they were accompanied by young children and elderly men and women, some of whom had fallen sick.

“We request the Pakistani government to evacuate us from here ... this is our constitutional right,” he said.

After the scholar’s video went viral on social media, the Pakistan Embassy contacted the citizens stuck at the airport to assure them that they would be provided hotel accommodation until their departure from China is sorted out. Rauf said they were waiting for the embassy to take action in this regard.

In a second video message, Rauf stressed that none of the Pakistanis stuck in Ürümqi had been affected by the novel coronavirus and that they were in Xinjiang, which is far away from Wuhan — the epicentre of the virus outbreak.

He said the Pakistani government could send a team to screen the passengers for the virus but that it should make efforts to evacuate them soon.

In a separate video clip posted on the microblogging site Twitter earlier this week, a group of students from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology had appealed to the Pakistani government to evacuate them.

“We’ve been trapped on the campus for so many days. And now we’re also running out of food supplies,” a girl student, who identifies herself as Hafsa Tayyab, says in the clip with more than a dozen students, all wearing surgical masks, standing behind her.

Published in Dawn, February 1st, 2020