Amid reports regarding the arbitrary offloading of passengers travelling abroad, an official from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday clarified that people were only being offloaded or denied boarding if they did not have valid documents or authorities suspected them of working with migrant smugglers.<\/p>\n
Over the past few months, numerous incidents have been reported of travellers being offloaded from flights at various airports, despite possessing valid travel documents. The actions came after a crack down on migrant smuggling after last year\u2019s Greece boat tragedy that claimed several Pakistani lives. Earlier this month, FIA Director General Riffat Mukhtar acknowledged that incidents of people being offloaded had been reported at Lahore and Karachi airports, and that investigations were underway.<\/p>\n
In a video statement shared today, FIA Lahore Zone Director Captain (retired) Muhammad Ali Zia addressed the recent issue of \u201cmisleading AI-generated videos and false information circulating on social media regarding alleged offloading incidents at airports\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll these rumours have no connection with reality,\u201d Zia said, referring to reports of people being offloaded \u201cfor no reason\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, the FIA officer noted that a lot of people were those \u201cwho get deceived by various human smugglers in some way\u201d.<\/p>\n
Zia detailed that FIA immigration officials at airports check the travel documents of \u201call those people and profile them\u201d, asserting that no one going abroad for a valid purpose was being stopped.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll those who are denied from going abroad are refused due to them not having valid documents, or if they have permits or visas wherein the companies stated do not exist, and we have suspicions that human smugglers are trapping them and taking them abroad.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have seen cases where people get deceived by these human smugglers and change their routes mid-transit, or take an accomplice with them in the form of their mother or sister, through which they can exit here with the [safeguard] of an Umrah [visa],\u201d Zia said.<\/p>\n
He added there had been past cases where such people were deported from other countries, following which the FIA\u2019s Anti-Human Trafficking Cell registers a case, conducts an inquiry and \u201csuch human traffickers are brought to a halt\u201d.<\/p>\n
He urged the public not to be fooled by migrant smugglers. The FIA officer said those networks were negatively portraying the matter to \u201ccreate unrest\u201d and secure financial gains for themselves.<\/p>\n
He recalled the Mauritania and Greece boat capsize incidents, saying that innocent people were shown \u201cdreams of Europe\u201d and smuggled out of Pakistan via dunki (illegal land routes) or by transiting in other countries, only to be pressured into handing over exorbitant amounts of cash or even losing their lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot only does Pakistan\u2019s name on an international level get maligned and the value of our green passport declines, but many countries have also created difficulties for us in obtaining visas,\u201d the FIA Lahore director said.<\/p>\n
Zia assured the public that immigration staff would facilitate all those who were travelling abroad for legitimate reasons with valid documents.<\/p>\n
The FIA\u2019s Facebook post said \u201csuch fabricated content aims to misguide the public and undermine institutional credibility\u201d, and urged citizens to rely only on verified information from official FIA platforms.<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, BBC Urdu reported that it spoke to some of the offloaded individuals, including a 25-year-old man from Hyderabad who had obtained a work visa for Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n
Another person, aged 35, who hailed from Punjab\u2019s Sargodha, was stopped from travelling to Saudi Arabia from Karachi, and later also barred from travelling to Dubai from Lahore for work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amid reports regarding the arbitrary offloading of passengers travelling abroad, an official from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Thursday clarified that people were only being offloaded or denied boarding if they did not have valid documents or authorities suspected them of working with migrant smugglers. Over the past few months, numerous incidents have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13653,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pakistan-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13654,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13652\/revisions\/13654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}