A prison official in Karachi, Pakistan, said they would start deporting Afghan women who had been sentenced for living in the country without legal documents from the first week of January.
Pakistani police in multiple raids detained at least 1,200 Afghan nationals, including women and children, who had entered the southern port city of Karachi without valid travel documents, officials said Thursday.
“In the first week of January, the process to deport around 58 of them will start,” said Sheeba Shah, the superintendent for the Central Prison for Women in Karachi as quoted by AP.
Some imprisoned women said that they will return to Afghanistan after their release from prison.
“Please let us go. We have been here for over two months. For God’s sake let us go now. Please release us. We have served our two-month sentence. We should be released now. Have mercy on us for God’s sake,” said Gul Khanda, 65, prisoner in Pakistan, from Paktia, Afghanistan.
“We came from Afghanistan. We are poor. My husband is old. He can’t work. My two sons used to work for a brick kiln. If you don’t want us to work here, let us go back to Afghanistan. We have a house there. We will go back home. I am sick and so are my two daughters in law. For God’s sake, release us so we may go back home.” said Nilofar, 67, prisoner in Pakistan, from Parwan.
Meanwhile, the charge d’affaires of the Afghan embassy in Pakistan, Sardar Ahmad Khan Shekib, in an interview with TOLOnews said that nearly 2,000 Afghans are imprisoned in Pakistani prisons and that their situation is concerning.
“Some of them don’t have documents, and some of them have been detained in Karachi previously. There are about 2,000 of them. They were arrested by the police because they did not have legal documents, and were put in jail,” he said.
Following the fall of the previous government, a large number of Afghans went to Pakistan in the past 16 months.
Islamabad has recently stepped up the process of arresting Afghans without legal documents.—Tolo news
