Focus on fake travel documents

As 29-year-old Javed arrived at the district court in Rawalpindi, the Pakistani capital's twin city, he said he had not applied for a visa for the UK because he was sure it would not be granted. "We all know that they don't give young Pakistani men visas," he told IRIN. "I paid an agent three lakh rupees [US $5,000] for a UK visa in my passport, but I was stopped at the airport," he said. Javed is now waiting for his case to go through the courts before he will try once again. "Why should I stay here when I can have a better life there?" Javed is just one of thousands of Pakistanis who will go to any lengths in trying to leave the country, where poverty is rife and the average wage is $1 per day. "There is high unemployment, and no incentive for people here," an immigration lawyer, Imran Safdar, told IRIN in Rawalpindi. "The agents are playing with peoples' lives, and are operating a huge racket," he maintained. Commenting on the long queues, particularly outside the British high commission and the US embassy in Islamabad, Safdar said most of his clients had told him that this was enough to put them off from applying for a visa. "People wait there overnight to get ahead of the queue, only to be refused a visa. So the best option for them is to go through the agents," he explained. "They are willing and consenting parties, and do not realise that not only are they taking a risk of spending time behind bars but they are being looted too," he stressed. The UK is said to be the most popular destination due to the large Pakistani community living there within a population of 2.5 million Asians. In 2001, the British high commission in Islamabad received some 79,000 visa applications from within the capital alone, according to a British official. When a passenger is caught with irregular documents, he or she is most likely to face a hefty fine of up to $7,000. There is also a harsh punishment for the agents: under Pakistani law, anyone caught sending people abroad illegally faces a sentence of 14 years in prison. However, this does not seem to be a deterrent as the agents operate on demand. "After all, everyone wants to have a good life," Safdar said. He cited one case where a man was caught three times with fake documents at the Islamabad international airport. "People are persistent, and they will go to any means to get out." Safdar said there was also a new trend, with Pakistani women posing as Afghan nationals. He cited an incident in which a woman was stopped at the airport, having purchased a fake Afghan passport for $500. In another case, a man was quoted $12,000 for fake documents, some of which he paid before his departure, with the rest to be paid in the UK, with a guarantor held in Pakistan. "People will do anything to try and get out of the country, even sell their homes," Safdar said. The success rate of catching agents was fairly high, once a passenger had been stopped, according to the lawyer. On average, one agent was arrested in every second case, and was made to return the money taken from the client, he said. "I would say in 80 percent of all cases, the traveller will tell us who the agent is, although some give fake names, because they have been threatened by the agents, and others compromise because they feel the agents will help them again in the future," Safdar said. He added, however, that for every 1,000 people arrested with fake documents, thousands could have slipped through the system. "The agents are professional, and they make sure there is no evidence and only cash payments." There are many different ways by which fake documents can be obtained from agents, either before leaving the country or en route in Dubai or Cairo, according to the head of immigration at Islamabad airport. One common method of claiming asylum in the UK is to board a plane with a courier who is working for the agent. The courier then takes the fake documents from the passenger on the plane before arrival, thereby ensuring that the client cannot be deported and remains in the country until the case is heard. "Over the past few years, we have had a vast improvement in the number of people caught, including the agents," the head of immigration at Islamabad airport, Sardar Azeem, told IRIN. "We have trained staff who can detect people with improper documents even before they check in." The only time when it is difficult to detect a person with improper documents is when he or she has already been travelling. "We caught one man with such papers on departure from Pakistan after he had been living in the UK for 15 years," he said. While acknowledging that there were good reasons for Pakistanis wanting to emigrate, Azeem said many did not realise that they would end up as victims. "They land in the UK without a job, and believe that the streets are paved with pounds. But they do not realise that they will be paying the agents for the rest of their lives." Azeem said his department had been working very closely with the British high commission towards curbing the problem. "We have learnt a lot from the foreign mission when it comes to this matter, and they have been very cooperative and helpful in advising us," he said. The airlines also suffer when a person carrying illicit documents is found to be travelling on one of their carriers. In 2001, the number of people caught with irregular documents at Islamabad airport was 330, according to the immigration department stationed there. In 2000, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) had the highest number of prospective passengers travelling with such documents - a total of 378, followed by British Airways (BA) at 82. "We are doing our best to curb the number of people involved in this racket, and so far I think we are succeeding," Imran Gardezi, a spokesman for PIA, told IRIN from the southern Pakistani city of Karachi. "There are a gang of professional criminals with professional equipment making perfect copies of passports and visas, and the embassies are still not able to come up with something that cannot be replicated," the manager of BA in Islamabad, Roland Blaney, told IRIN. For every passenger caught on a flight without valid documents there is a fine of around $3,500, dependent on previous track records. Over the past 12 months, BA staff have caught some 60 people with fake documents trying to board flights to the west. "We have been a lot more successful at identifying people without documents because of our strong approach, and we take this very seriously," Blaney said, stressing that his staff were very rigorous during the ticketing and booking procedure, without compromising customer service.