(6 Feb 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sheikhupura, Pakistan – 6 February 2025
1. Relatives walking in street crying and carrying coffin of
2. SOUNDBITE (Urdu) Muhammad Adnan Khan, brother: ++PARTLY OVERLAID++
“We sold our land, we sold our buffaloes and sent my brother to Spain so that he could have a good future but we have received his dead body. Our demand to the government is that this agent (human trafficker) should be punished and give us justice.”
3. Various of funeral procession
4. SOUNDBITE (Punjabi) Naseer Ahmed Khan, villager who also tried to reach Spain and returned safely: ++PARTLY OVERLAID++
“My appeal to the government is to arrest and punish those agents who lure people and take them there. The people are poor and sell everything for the better future of their children and try to get there, but there is only humiliation and dishonor there, nothing else.”
5. Relatives around coffin
6. Close of woman weeping
7. Funeral prayers
STORYLINE:
The bodies of four Pakistanis who were among dozens of people who drowned after a migrant boat capsized off West Africa last month have been repatriated.
The four were among 13 Pakistani citizens identified through DNA tests.
Their remains were brought home from Morocco overnight by a Saudi flight that landed at the Islamabad International Airport, officials said Thursday.
The bodies were later buried in their hometowns in Punjab province.
The boat had set off from Mauritania on January 2 with 80 passengers, including several from Pakistan, according to the Foreign Ministry and a Spain-based migrant rights group, Walking Borders.
The ministry said the boat capsized near the Moroccan port of Dakhla en route to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago off northwest Africa where many migrants head on a dangerous Atlantic crossing in ramshackle boats.
Walking Borders had said 50 people on the boat died on their way to the Canary Islands and 44 of them were Pakistanis.
Pakistan has already repatriated all of its 22 survivors.
The brother of one of the migrants who died told The Associated Press that human smugglers had tortured and thrown the migrants, including his brother, into the sea over a payment dispute.
Mohammad Adnan said his family had paid 5 million rupees ($18,000) to a local human smuggler for sending his brother, Mohammad Arslan, to Europe and 4 million rupees ($14,000) were paid in advance.
The rest was yet to be paid when they heard news about the capsizing, and later some of the survivors said the migrants were thrown into the sea.
Recently, some of the survivors have also said their boat never capsized and African human smugglers had tortured migrants with hammers and threw them into the sea in a payment dispute.
No government official was immediately available to comment on the claims.
After the sinking, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari on January 18 stressed the need for strict measures to curb human trafficking.
Pakistan says it is cracking down on human traffickers and sacked several immigration officials for negligence.
AP video shot by Jahanzaib Aurangzaib
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