ISLAMABAD: Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said on Tuesday the Pakistan government would speak to authorities in Greece about the “criminal negligence” of the country’s coast guard after a fishing vessel capsized in the early hours of June 14 with around 750 illegal migrants onboard, many of them from Pakistan.
Only 104 people are known to have survived and 80 bodies of the dead brought ashore, Greek authorities have said, with most of the people on the boat hailing from Egypt, Syria and Pakistan.
Shipwrecks are common in the Mediterranean Sea, but the recent mishap has put Greece under increasing scrutiny over its response to the disaster, which occurred even though the boat had been shadowed by its coast guard for several hours.
Appearing on a talk show on Tuesday morning, Sanaullah was asked if Pakistan would raise with Greece the issue of the coast guard’s “criminal negligence.”
“Yes, definitely, the government will raise this with Greece as it is the duty of the government to do so,” he said.
“Our foreign affairs department is looking into the matter, but I also think that human rights organizations, both in Pakistan and abroad, should also come forward and speak against illegal migration.”
The interior minister said Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had formed a committee to probe the matter and present its recommendations to the government within a week.
“The committee’s mandate is to arrest all those human traffickers because of whom so many young men lost their lives. Secondly, the perpetrators must be tried after being arrested, and ensure that the money they took from the victims, amounting to Rs2 million to Rs3 million, must be returned to their families.”
The committee would also recommend amendments to existing anti-human trafficking laws, especially in terms of ensuring certainty of punishment.
On Monday, the Ministry of Interior established a coordination cell to verify information of relatives of the passengers aboard the ill-fated boat and set up camp offices in Islamabad and Azad Kashmir.
The coordination cell will also assist families of the passengers to give DNA samples as per the requisite parameters provided by the Embassy of Pakistan in Greece and coordinate with the Punjab Forensic Science Agency to prepare DNA reports to send to Greece, a notification from the interior ministry said.
According to the United Nations, nearly 1,000 migrants have either died or gone missing while trying to reach the European shores in rickety boats this year. In January, the Pakistani government confirmed nine Pakistani citizens died in two separate shipwrecks in Italy and Libya.
