It’s a shame that the immigration staff behaved this way with two helpless women
LUSAKA, ZAMBIA: Recently I secured employment in Zambia and subsequently moved there for the purpose. My wife and daughter were supposed to join me later after attending to some important family matters. They both reached the Islamabad airport on April 12th to board the Emirates flight 615 at 12:00 am with one-way tickets. As Zambia does not have an embassy in Pakistan, so only online visitor or business visas are issued to the applicants. These visas are then converted into residential permits through a brief process in Lusaka for those with specific job offers.
The immigration staff at Islamabad airport asked my family to produce return tickets as a requirement for travel on visit visas. My wife immediately got the return tickets issued in their name through the travel agent despite the fact that it was already past midnight. The Emirates staff got the return ticket printed and the immigration officer cleared them for boarding. However, the immigration supervisor was suspicious. He inspected my wife’s and daughter’s passports for 30 minutes and told them that they have “tampered with some immigration stamps on the passport”. The two ladies pleaded with them that they had no reason to tamper with the passport for going to Zambia for which they already had electronic visas. The immigration supervisor, however, stopped them from boarding the aircraft and kept examining the passports along with his other colleagues. The officer later asked my daughter to dial my number in Lusaka and then spoke to me himself to ask for my passport details. Finally, after investigating my wife and daughter for three hours and causing them unnecessary inconvenience, the passports and all stamps were declared ‘genuine’ by the same staff. My family was later allowed to board the flight just a few minutes before the gates were closed.
It’s a shame that the immigration staff behaved this way with two helpless women. I travelled on a one-way ticket only a couple of days back from the same airport but no questions were asked. Further, instead of any scientific methods to scrutinise documents, old and pathetic tactics of questioning the passengers were employed to extract information. The immigration staff accused my family of forgery but when proved wrong they did not even have the courtesy to apologise let alone compensate the victims.
Fayyaz Ahmad Khan
Published in The Express Tribune, April 19th, 2018.
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