10,000 Pakistanis had registered as Afghan refugees for dollars from UN
THE SCAM CAME TO LIGHT AFTER A U.N. BODY SET $400 FOR EACH REFUGEE RETURNING TO THEIR HOMELAND
UNDER A VOLUNTARY REPATRIATION SCHEME
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra) has tracked over 10,000 Pakistanis who registered themselves as Afghan refugees in exchange for dollar stipends.
The scam came to light as the UN High Commission for Refugees had set $400 for each Afghan refugee returning to their homeland under a voluntary repatriation scheme. Nadra chairman Usman Yusuf Mobeen told a Parliamentary briefing that 10,000 Pakistani nationals misused the scheme, cheating the UN.
Mobeen said the cases of fake identities were caught by the Nadra system when they came to obtain national identity cards, as their cards had been blocked.
He explained that cards were blocked in five different categories of suspicious cases.
The Nadra chairman said around one million Afghan refugees had been repatriated to Afghanistan under the voluntary repatriation scheme.
Each refugee ready to return home was given $400 by the UN High Commission for Refugees.
The issue came to the parliament’s attention after Nadra refused to issue national identity cards to people of Pakhtun origin living in Balochistan.
“There were 2.4 million regis- tered Afghan refugees in Pakistan at one time,” Mubeen said, adding that 1.5 million unregistered Afghan refugees were also living in the country.
He said that many of those Afghan nationals got fake ID cards posing themselves to be part of the family trees of Paki- stani nationals in connivance with some government officials. Even those Pakistanis were suspected cases whose family trees were used to issue these fake ID cards, the chairman said.
He said the authority had found 156,000 suspected cases during a national drive.
Even Abdol Malek Rigi , former head of an Iran-based terrorist group and his family, had succeeded to get Pakistani national i dentity cards by intruding into the family trees.
In another development, US prosecutors on Friday arrested a New Yorker who was about to catch a flight to Pakistan to join the terror group Lashkar-eToiba.