Islamabad:
Survivors from the Morocco boat tragedy told an upset tale of “inhuman treatment” who were met by the human smugglers, during the question of the federal investigative agency (FIA) upon their arrival at Islamabad Airport, officials said Friday.
Seven more survivors returned home on Friday and raised the total number of deported from Morocco to 14, they said. Immediately upon arrival, they were brought into the FIA parent authority to interrogate. Some of the returns were injured, they added.
The tragic incident took place on January 16, when a boat bearing irregular migrants from Mauritania to Spain, the Moroccan coast hijacked and killed 46 people. The boat, which had departed from Mauritania on January 2nd, had 86 people on board – 66 of them were the Pakistani citizens.
Moroccan authorities reported that the accident was taking place on the sea off the coast of Dakhla, saving 36 survivors. Last week, the Foreign Office had confirmed that 22 Pakistani citizens were among the survivors and that they would be repatriated to Pakistan in batches.
Seven Pakistan reached Pakistan this week, while another batch of seven survivors, Mehtab, Muhammad Khaliq, Yellow Shamir, Waseem, Ali Hassan, Bilawal Iqbal and Umar Farooq, arrived on Friday. During the interrogations, they talked about the torture of the human smugglers.
The FIA officials said that the recurring people belonged to Gujarat, Sheikhupura, Sialkot, Mandi Bahauddin, Narowal and Rawalpindi Districts in Punjab. They added that these people had made the confused attempt to go to Spain illegally via Dubai and Senegal.
Based on the information collected from the returning, the officials said they paid RS2.2 to 3.5 million to the agents – belonging to different parts of Punjab to travel to Spain. Originally, they were sent to Dubai and then Ethiopia and Senegal at Visa. From Senegal they were sent to Spain by sea.
“After completing half of the journey by plane, they were taken to Senegal, from where they were handed over to the human smugglers for further journey in Mauritania,” an official said. He added that the smugglers began to torture them from the third day of their journey on a small boat.
According to the official, the victims endured hunger and thirst. They revealed that the smugglers would throw the sick passengers overboard. Passengers said that for the last day when the boat sank, conditions were so worse that they had to drink seawater.
The FIA said the recurring passages were handed over to the FIA zone team for further study to bust the human smuggling networks operating in Pakistan. Based on the latest interrogation, a facilitator, Abdul Ghaffar, had been arrested by the FIA.
