More than 100 Shi'ite Muslims from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have returned to a group of villages in Pakistan's predominantly rural Chakwal region without employment, luggage, or access to the savings they spent years accumulating overseas.
They are among the thousands of Shi'ites who may have been deported from the UAE to Pakistan during the US-Iran War, which alarmed the Shi'ite community in Pakistan and prompted an investigation by Human Rights Watch, reported Reuters.
A 38-year-old former Dubai Metro manager, who claimed to have been deported after 16 years in the emirate, sat with a few neighbors in Chakwal, in the central province of Punjab.
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According to the metro manager, after holding him for nine days, police took away his phones, put him in handcuffs, and loaded him onto a crowded, dark bus that transported him to the airport, and in an instant, I was back to zero," Reuters quoted him as saying.
A 41-year-old construction worker claimed that UAE officials inquired about his pay and remittances. He stated, "Then they asked whether I fund Iran."
Falah Sayed, a human rights officer with MENA Rights Group, stated, "The crackdown on Shia Muslims in the UAE is not new." Although the Geneva-based NGO has "documented cases of arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance targeting foreign nationals of Shia origin for years," she stated that there has been "an escalation in this crackdown" in recent reports.
Reuters interviewed 24 of the 103 Pakistanis who claimed to be deported Shi'ites and examined immigration records, screenshots of their visa status, and travel information. Before being put on flights with scores of other Shi'ite deportees, each interviewee claimed they were unable to retrieve their funds or luggage.
According to Reuters, the Pakistani Shi'ite political group Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen claims 7,500 Pakistani Shi'ites have been expelled from the Gulf Arab nation since the United States and Israel began attacking Iran on February 28. According to Mohsin Abidi, a group spokesperson, the real figure was probably much higher.
The UAE has not deported anyone based on their sect, according to a statement from Pakistan's interior ministry, which claimed that any deportations were due to breaking UAE laws. Without giving specifics, Pakistan's foreign ministry stated that "deportation figures remain steady" this year.
However, Islamabad was "reviewing the situation after receiving thousands of Pakistanis deported from the UAE," most of them were Shi'ites, the report attributed to a senior Pakistani government official. He claimed that the Pakistani government had not publicly pursued the case for "diplomatic reasons."
Michael Page, the deputy Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch, stated that the organisation was "investigating these serious allegations" and that "reports of UAE deportations of Pakistani Shia residents are deeply alarming".
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