Pakistan president begins state visit to Beijing amid tensions over security of Chinese interests

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) on Monday arrested the main suspect behind a 2023 boat capsize off Greece, which claimed lives of over 250 Pakistanis, the agency said.
Hundreds of migrants, including 262 Pakistanis, drowned, when an overcrowded vessel traveling from Libya capsized and sank in international waters off the southwestern Greek coastal town of Pylos in June 2023. This disaster became one of the deadliest boat tragedies ever recorded in the Mediterranean Sea.
It highlighted the perilous journeys many migrants undertake, often driven by economic hardship, as young individuals seek better financial opportunities by attempting dangerous crossings to Europe, prompting the Pakistani government to order “intensified” measures against human traffickers.
The FIA said the suspect, Mohammad Iqbal, who had been living in Libya since 2013, was arrested by FIA immigration officials upon arrival at the Lahore airport.
“The suspect was running a human trafficking network from Libya,” the FIA said in a statement. “The suspect illegally sent several Pakistani citizens to Europe from Libya via boats.”
The FIA said it had traced illegal transactions amounting to Rs80 million ($287,356) from Iqbal’s bank account, adding that he was booked in multiple cases registered with the FIA Lahore zone.
FIA Lahore Director Sarfraz Virk said a crackdown on human trafficking networks was ongoing, vowing to bring human traffickers to justice.
“Strict punishment will be meted out to human traffickers responsible for boat incidents,” he was quoted as saying by the FIA. “FIA teams are in constant contact with the affected families.”
Last month, the FIA issued red notices for 20 foreign-based human traffickers involved in the 2023 Greek boat tragedy. A red notice is a request from a member country of the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) to other member states to locate and arrest a person to extradite them to face criminal charges.
Several Pakistanis, in a bid to escape economic hardships at home, often undertake these illegal and dangerous journeys to enter Europe.
Last year, five Pakistani nationals died in a shipwreck off the southern Greek island of Gavdos on Dec. 14. More recently, a boat capsized near Morocco’s coast on Jan. 15 while carrying 86 migrants, including 66 Pakistanis, according to migrant rights group Walking Borders. Pakistan’s Foreign Office has confirmed 22 survivors of the incident.

ISLAMABAD: Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan has written a letter to the chief of the country’s powerful army, General Asim Munir, and urged him to reconsider existing policies to end political instability in the country, Khan’s lawyer said on Monday.
The development comes amid renewed political tensions between Khan-led opposition and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government in Pakistan, following the breakdown of weeks-long talks between the two sides. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party accuses the government of causing the breakdown by failing to release political prisoners and establish judicial commissions to investigate violent protests of May 9, 2023, and Nov. 26, 2024. The government says Khan’s party walked away from the talks “unilaterally” before they had a chance to address the PTI’s demands.
Khan’s ouster in a parliamentary no-trust vote in 2022 has plunged Pakistan into a political crisis, particularly since he was jailed in August 2023 on corruption and other charges and remains behind bars. His PTI party and supporters have regularly held protests calling for his release, with many of the demonstrations turning violent.
Speaking to reporters in Rawalpindi, Khan’s lawyer Faisal Chaudhry said the ex-premier has detailed six points in his letter, which he considers the reasons behind a growing divide between the country’s armed forces and the Pakistani people, and says that a change in current policies was the “need of the hour.”
“The first of all reasons, according to Imran Khan, is the rigging of Feb. 8, [2024] election,” he said. “This is the first point due to which a gulf was created between people and the institutions [armed forces].”
Pakistan held its general election on Feb. 8, 2024 that was marred by a mobile Internet shutdown and unusually delayed results. The polls threw up a hung National Assembly and were followed by weeks of protests by opposition parties over allegations of rigging and vote count fraud. The government and election authorities deny any systematic rigging of polls.
Khan last month called on his party’s members and supporters from all walks of life to mark Feb. 8 as a “Black Day” and hold protests across the country to protest alleged rigging of last year’s polls.
“Second, the judiciary in Pakistan has been controlled under the 26th constitutional amendment and the 26th constitutional amendment was brought to bulldoze justice system in the country,” Chaudhry said as he quoted Khan, saying the amendment was aimed at providing a cover to the “election fraud.”
The amendment empowered parliament to pick the country’s top judge among other changes.
The lawyer also said Khan’s letter mentioned among other things the recent amendments to the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) that he said were aimed at stifling dissent on social media, a crackdown on his party’s members and supporters, violation of various court orders, and alleged threats to judges and journalists that were widening the divide between the armed forces and the Pakistani people.
Khan fell out with Pakistan army’s top leaders in the lead-up to his ouster from the PM’s office, and has since led an unprecedented campaign of defiance against the all-powerful army, which has ruled the South Asian country for nearly half of its 75-year history, and even when not in power, it is considered the invisible guiding hand in politics. The army has in recent years said it no longer interferes in politics.
Tensions between Khan’s PTI and the army further heightened after Khan’s brief arrest on May 9, 2023, in a land graft case that sparked countrywide protests, with PTI supporters attacking and ransacking military installations in an unprecedented backlash against the army.
The military has called the day of the protests a “Black Day” and vowed to punish those involved. Since then, thousands of Khan’s supporters have been arrested and dozens of his top party members have defected after they faced increasing pressure from the military establishment to do so, according to his supporters. The army denies it.
“Policies need to be changed swiftly and they should be kept in accordance with the constitution and law, so that political instability in the country may end and the country may move toward stability,” Khan’s lawyer said.
“As long as these policies are not changed, it is difficult for the country to reach a point of stability.”