Pakistan rejects Trump’s Gaza displacement proposal as ‘deeply troubling and unjust’

MIRZA VIRKAN: A Pakistani who drowned along with 12 compatriots when a boat carrying dozens of migrants capsized off northwest Africa was buried in his hometown on Thursday.
Each year thousands of Pakistanis pay large sums to traffickers to launch risky and illegal journeys to Europe, where they hope to find work and send funds to support families back home.

Pakistanis are frequently among those drowned on crammed boats which sink on the Mediterranean Sea separating North Africa from Europe — the world’s deadliest migrant route.
Islamabad’s foreign ministry this week said 13 of its citizens were among the dead recovered from a boat which went down in the Atlantic.

Around 80 passengers were aboard the vessel, which left Mauritania and sailed north toward Spain’s Canary Islands before it capsized near the Western Sahara port of Dakhla, the ministry said on January 16.
On Thursday the village of Mirza Virkan in eastern Punjab province buried Arslan Khan — one of four bodies from the shipwreck repatriated a day earlier.

“We sent Arslan to build a better future, and the trafficker assured us that he would send him legally,” his 34-year-old brother Adnan Khan told AFP.
“We sold our property and animals for Arslan’s future, but the trafficker betrayed us — he sent back our brother’s dead body.”

Pakistan has one of the highest rates of emigration in the world, according to the United Nation’s International Organization for Migration.
Many migrants depart from Punjab and the northeastern region of Pakistan administered Kashmir because their communities have historic ties to the country’s diaspora in Europe.
An official from the Federal Investigation Agency, speaking anonymously to AFP in 2023, estimated Pakistanis attempt 40,000 illegal trips every year.
In June that year the Mediterranean witnessed one of its worst migrant shipwrecks when a rusty and overloaded trawler sank overnight.
It was carrying more than 750 people — up to 350 of them Pakistanis according to Islamabad — but only 82 bodies were ever recovered.

ISLAMABAD: An anti-corruption court on Thursday acquitted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his son Hamza Shahbaz on charges of using public funds to benefit Ramzan Sugar Mills, built by the premier’s father in 1992 and part of the Sharif Group of Companies.
The case, filed by the National Accountability Bureau on Feb. 18, 2019, involved allegations Sharif had used public funds to build a sludge carrier in Chiniot district in Punjab province to benefit Ramzan Sugar Mills, owned by his sons. Sharif was the chief minister of Punjab province at the time. NAB had alleged the project inflicted a loss of Rs213 million to the national exchequer.
“An Anti-Corruption Court Lahore has acquitted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and former Punjab Chief Minister Hamza Shehbaz in the Ramzan Sugar Mills case,” state broadcaster Radio Pakistan said on Thursday. “The verdict was announced by Judge of Anti-Corruption Court Sardar Iqbal Dogar in Lahore.”
Sharif and son Hamza were indicted in the case in 2019. They had pleaded during hearings since that the sludge carrier was not constructed only to cater to the family’s mill but to benefit the area.
“The acquittal came after the NAB informed the court that it had found no evidence of financial corruption or misuse of authority by Shehbaz and stated and stated that the allegations of misuse of authority and corruption against the former prime minister were not substantiated under the National Accountability Ordinance of 1999,” Pakistan’s top news channel, Geo News, reported.
“The premier and former chief minister, in the 2018 reference, was accused of causing massive financial loss to the national kitty by awarding the contract to a construction firm without a competitive bidding process.”
In Nov. 2023, Sharif and 10 others were acquitted by an accountability court in the Lahore in the Ashiana-e-Iqbal Housing Scheme reference. 
Sharif, 73, is the younger brother of three-time Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who spearheaded their Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) party’s election campaign for the 2024 general election.
This is Sharif’s second term as prime minister. He first replaced cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan as prime minister after the latter’s ouster in a no-confidence vote in parliament in April 2022.
Sharif is best known for his direct, “can-do” administrative style, which was on display when, as chief minister of Punjab province, he worked closely with China on Beijing-funded projects after 2013. He also planned and executed a number of ambitious infrastructure mega-projects, including Pakistan’s first modern mass transport system in his hometown, the eastern city of Lahore.