600 Pakistanis deported from Oman back home

IRNA (09 November 2006)

A group of 600 Pakistani citizens arrived at the port of Karachi aboard a cargo ship on Thursday after they were deported from Oman for illegal entry, a human rights group said.

A spokesman for the Ansar Burney Welfare Trust, which facilitated the repatriation of the thousands of Pakistanis from Oman, said that the men had been deported following a request by the Pakistani government.

According to the Ansar Burney Trust International, over 130,000 Pakistanis who had entered Oman to seek employment had been deported during the last two-and-a-half years.

Some of the deportees abroad the Al-Tawakkal ship were sick.

The Ansar Burney Trust provided them food and new clothes. They were received along with others by the chairman of Ansar Burney, Advocate Syed Sarim Burney, and other volunteers of the Trust.

Officials from the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) questioned the deportees about the agents who sent them illegally to Oman and who allegedly took huge amounts of money from them.

They are to be sent home after the questioning is completed.

Pakistan is facing the problem of human trafficking despite claims by the government that it is taking tough steps to check the menace.

Some of the deportees said that they had been in jails for different periods of times and from days to years during which their condition had deteriorated due to malnutrition and lack of basic facilities.

Ansar Burney told the newsmen that he was also working on finding missing children in several Persian Gulf states.

Thousands of children from the ages of 3 to 10 who had been trafficked to Persian Gulf countries to be used as child camel jockeys are still missing.

Ansar Burney said that human trafficking from Pakistan to Middle Eastern and Arab countries has increased due to multiple reasons with poverty at the top.

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