Migrants: harrowing tale of torture

Survivors of the Morocco boat tragedy narrated a harrowing tale of "inhuman treatment" meted out to them by the human smugglers, during the questioning by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) upon their arrival at the Islamabad airport, officials said on Friday.

Seven more survivors returned home on Friday, raising the total number of the deportees from Morocco to 14, they said. Immediately upon arrival, they were taken into the FIA custody for questioning. Some of the returnees were injured, they added.

The tragic incident occurred on January 16, when a boat, carrying irregular migrants from Mauritania to Spain, capsized off the Moroccan coast, killing 46 people. The boat, which had departed from Mauritania on January 2, had 86 people on board - 66 of them being the Pakistani nationals.

Moroccan authorities reported that the accident occurred at sea off the coast of Dakhla, and they rescued 36 survivors. Last week, the Foreign Office had confirmed that 22 Pakistani nationals were among the survivors and they would be repatriated to Pakistan in batches.

Seven Pakistan reached Pakistan this week, while another batch of seven survivors, Mehtab, Muhammad Khaliq, Gul Shamir, Waseem, Ali Hassan, Bilawal Iqbal and Umar Farooq, arrived on Friday. During the questioning, they spoke of torture by the human smugglers.

The FIA officials said that the returning people belonged to Gujarat, Sheikhupura, Sialkot, Mandi Bahauddin, Narowal and Rawalpindi districts of Punjab. They added that those people had made the botched attempt to go to Spain illegally via Dubai and Senegal.

Based on the information gleaned from the returnees, the officials said, they paid Rs2.2 to 3.5 million each to the agents - who belonged to different parts of Punjab for travelling to Spain. Initially, they were sent to Dubai and then Ethiopia and Senegal on visa. From Senegal they were sent to Spain by sea.

"After completing half the journey by air, they were taken to Senegal, from where they were handed over to the human smugglers for onward travel of Mauritania," an official said. He added that the smugglers started torturing 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. The passengers said that on the last day, when the boat sank, the conditions were so worse that they had to drink seawater.

The FIA said that those returning passenger were being handed over to the FIA zone team concerned for further investigation to bust the human smuggling networks operating in Pakistan. Based on the latest interrogation, a facilitator, Abdul Ghaffar, had been arrested by the FIA.