PESHAWAR, Aug 15: Kuwaiti companies have started recruiting Pakistanis after federal government’s assurance on curbing drug trafficking, sources told Dawn on Tuesday.
There had been an increase in the recruitment of Pakistani manpower to Kuwaiti companies since July, said Mudassar Shah, acting chief of the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment (BEOE).
He said 161 people from the NWFP managed to get jobs in Kuwait in the month of July and over a hundred so far this month, although the figure stood only 73 during the first six months of the ongoing year.
According to a senior official, the Kuwaiti government had placed a ban on manpower from Pakistan in early 2004 after the arrest of hundreds of Pakistanis on charges of drug trafficking.
Mr Shah said that apprehensions of the Kuwaiti government about drug smuggling from Pakistan and dispatch of Afghan refugees on green passports had been allayed.
He said a few months ago, senior officials of BEOE and the ministries of interior, foreign affairs and labour and manpower held a meeting with Kuwaiti officials in Islamabad and discussed the issue in details.
The Kuwaiti officials demanded that the Pakistanis willing to enter Kuwait should have computerised national identity card, machine-readable passport, character certificate from district police and proper protector’s stamp on passport.
The government accepted the conditions, which encouraged manpower export to Kuwait, said Mr Shah.
Meanwhile, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has not yet identified those involved in sending 120 Pakistani drug traffickers to Kuwait in 2002 and early 2003.
The drug traffickers, most of whom travelled on forged travel documents from Peshawar International Airport, were arrested at the airport in Kuwait, sources in law-enforcement agencies confirmed.
Since 1999, a total of 256 people had been arrested in Kuwait on charges of drug trafficking. Five of them were executed late last year and one in May this year, they said, adding that 10 people were facing court cases and those remaining had been awarded life imprisonment.
According to the sources, the names of the executed Pakistanis are Mudassar Shah, son of Hikmat Shah, resident of Sherpao village of Charsadda district; Ahmad Khan (fake name Said Khan, son of Said Mir), resident of Khyber Agency; Faiz Mohammad, son of Younus Khan, resident of Tangi village in Charsadda district; and Abdul Baseer, son of Abdul Hayi, resident of Kota village in Swabi district. All were executed in October last year. While Mian Iqbal, a resident of Swat was executed on May 2 this year in Kuwait and his body was sent to Pakistan on May 8.
They said that a joint team of FIA and Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) had been formed to investigate the case.
In March this year, three senior officials of FIA, ANF and Immigration and Passport Department in Islamabad had gone to Kuwait and interrogated the detained Pakistanis, said the sources, adding that they confessed to carrying heroin and travelling on forged travel documents.
During their three-day stay in Kuwait, the Pakistani officials got pictures of the jailed drug traffickers. The Kuwaiti authorities also sent photocopies of their bogus travel documents including the original names of the hanged smugglers in order to help the FIA and ANF in their investigations.
According to the sources, Additional Director of FIA (immigration) Tariq Khosa had appointed Mr Shaukat Hayat, Deputy Director of FIA in Peshawar, as inquiry officer and dispatched the bogus travel documents to him.
Mr Hayat had completed his inquiry and sent a report to Islamabad early this month, but he had not fixed the responsibility on any of the immigration officials deputed at the Peshawar airport at that time, despite the fact that the Kuwaiti authorities had sent the passports of executed persons with the immigration counters stamps.
Sources said those on duty at that time could easily be identified if the FIA-ANF interrogators check the lists of the various travel agencies.