Travel restrictions: FIA ordered not to harass Christian siblings

The agency tells LHC it has not stopped Masih and Batool from going to Sri Lanka.

LAHORE: Lahore High Court ordered the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) director on Thursday not to create hindrances for two Christian siblings who wanted to visit Sri Lanka.

Petitioners Irfan Masih and his sister Maria Batool, residents of Kasur, had accused the FIA of offloading them twice from Sri Lanka-bound flights saying that they wanted to seek asylum.

Justice Hafiz Shahid Nadeem disposed of the petition and ordered the directors not to harass the petitioners.

The FIA submitted a report saying that its officials had not stopped Masih and Batool from boarding the flight. The FIA Punjab director submitted that in light of the immigration record, the petitioners had not come to the FIA immigration cell. They were also not offloaded from the plane, he said.

Masih and Batool had said in the petition they had been invited to visit Sri Lanka by a family friend, KA Nalika Damayanthi, a Sri Lankan national. Their counsel, Advocate Mushtaq Gill, said the petitioners had obtained visas and sponsor letters after due process. He said they had purchased tickets of Mihin Lanka (PVT) Ltd, a Sri Lankan airline, for departure on May 12 from Lahore to Colombo. At Allama Iqbal International Airport, FIA officials had stopped them and asked them if they had certain documents on them.

He said that they showed them the documents but the officials did not allow them to board the plane.

He said a few days later, they had bought new tickets and tried to board a flight to Colombo on June 1 from Allama Iqbal International Airport. They received their boarding cards but were once again stopped from boarding the flight. He said FIA officials had snatched their boarding passes and told them that several Pakistani Christians had travelled to Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka to seek asylum.

Gill said citizens whose passports mentioned Christian religion were often asked to provide assurance that they were not travelling abroad to seek asylum. Gill said when he was travelling to Italy in December 2014, he had been approached by some FIA officials at the airport who claimed that he intended to seek asylum in Italy. “I was allowed to travel after I asked some officers to intervene,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 12^th, 2015.