RAWALPINDI, July 28: President General Pervez Musharraf while talking to newspaper editors and columnists in Lahore on Monday had claimed that Pakistan had effectively dismantled the Al Qaeda network, making it impossible for the terrorist organization to use the country’s soil for planning and carrying out terrorist attacks in any part of the world.

In effect, the president is claiming that Pakistan has successfully wiped out Al-Qaeda’s headquarters from its soil. One hopes for the sake of Pakistan and its future generations that the president’s claim is based on verifiable facts. And hopefully in future no one would point a finger at Pakistan, if and when a terrorist attack occurs anywhere in the world as it happened in the case of London and Sharm-el-Sheikh bombings earlier this month.

With the investigations deepening Pakistan’s links with the London bombing are becoming too faint to be of any significance while the ones with the Sharm-el-Sheikh tragedy have already been refuted emphatically by Egypt itself.

Egypt being a friendly Muslim country nursing no grudge against Pakistan was quick enough to clear the air and remove Pakistan from its list of suspect countries. But just imagine what would have happened if these illegal Pakistanis had disappeared in a trigger-happy hostile-to-Pakistan country under attack from an Al-Qaeda type suicide bombing.

And this menace—the menace of human smuggling should now be worrying the government more than the Al Qaeda, as according to the president the Qaeda menace has already been taken care of.

The reason why the human smuggling aspect should worry the government more now is that Pakistanis in great numbers are being smuggled out to various countries by organized racketeers on daily basis. Ask any Pakistani ambassador posted in any country, no matter how far removed from Pakistan, he/she would have a story or two to tell you about Pakistanis entering the host country without valid documents and creating problems for him/her.

This gives Pakistan a very negative international image. And people the world over tend to regard Pakistan as a country specialising in exporting criminals and by association even Al Qaeda bombers.

Human trafficking is being conducted mostly through the porous Pakistan/Iran border and through small boats and launches operating between coastal belt of Balochistan, Pakistan and Muscat, Dubai and other Gulf States. Mand Bilo and Radhik, located in the border of tribal areas of Balochistan are the focal points for human trafficking to Iran, with or without travel documents.

Investigation of the cases of illegal immigration and human trafficking has revealed that smugglers use various methods to send people to and from Pakistan through authorised air, land and sea routes as well.

These methods included, changing of photos on forged Pakistani passports, replacement of biographical pages from genuine passports, genuine passports with forged or stolen visas, stolen Pakistani passports with fake entries, forged foreign resident cards, changing of photo on foreign passports, genuine foreign passports issued improperly.

As recently as in June this year the Pakistani mission in Cairo, the country where more than 60 people died in suicide bombings last Saturday, had unearthed a racket engaged in human trafficking and had sent a report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pakistan citing 90 per cent of cases of smuggling of illegal Pakistani immigrants to Europe through Egypt originate from Gujrat.

The report said that the Egyptian authorities caught 42 Pakistani illegal immigrants who were attempting to cross over to Europe on false documents between May 15 to June 8, 2005. Some of them even managed to reach Germany but they were captured and sent back to Egypt. Later, the Pakistani counsellor managed their early release and deportation.

On June 8,2005 five Pakistani nationals from Gujrat were captured by Egyptian authorities on charges of travelling on fake documents. The Egyptian government had asked Pakistan mission in Cairo to arrange tickets for the five Pakistanis so that they could be deported to Pakistan. The five were identified as Abdul Samiullah passport No KD-949979, Talat Masood KB-866079, Sohail Akbar KC-949979, Sajjad Ahmed KE-853016 and Saqib Ali KE-431118. All from Gujrat.

The six Pakistanis earlier suspected of involvement in Saturday’s deadly bombings in Sharm-el-Sheikh Egypt have also been declared by official media as “illegal aliens” as they had entered Egypt on July 5,2005. On investigation perhaps these six would also be found to be from Gujrat.

Pakistani mission in Cairo in its report had clearly identified by name and his political position the person who represented the Gujrat-based group which had been conducting human smuggling since 2004 and had also named the Egyptian agent who was involved in this racket. However, the local authorities for obvious reasons could not so far find any concrete evidence against any company/agency/agent in Pakistan or Egypt which had helped these people to enter Egypt.