ISLAMABAD, Oct 3: Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz on Tuesday directed the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to expedite efforts to curb human smuggling, apparently taking notice of reports that last year alone 23,000 Pakistanis were deported from various countries.

He issued the directive while presiding over a meeting which reviewed performance of FIA and discussed the challenges and problems faced by the agency.

The prime minister approved a proposal for 60 per cent raise in salaries of 558 immigration officers deployed on airports and in border areas. He also gave approval to creation of 266 posts in the agency. The meeting was informed that the FIA had issued a ‘red book’ containing names of 66 big human smugglers who had escaped to different countries.

The prime minister promised that all resources would be provided to FIA to enable it to perform its functions more effectively, especially in areas of immigration, human trafficking and intellectual property rights.

FIA Director-General Tariq Pervez informed the meeting that a ‘personal identification secure comparison and evaluation system’ had been installed at international exits which had stored data of 22.31 million passengers since November 2002.

He said that against 300 human smugglers arrested in 2004, the number of such arrests increased to 874 in 2006.