• Family of victims of tragedies for the Morocco ship sold land, paid rs4m each to suffer and atif could reach Spain from Mauritania
• The FIA official says ‘success stories’ of those who made it great in the West inspire many to send their relatives abroad
About 30 minutes from the GT road, in Tehsil Kharian, is the town of Dhola. When one turns off the carpet road to the gravel track that leads to the town, the several -story mansions splash the horizon, giving an idea of the wealth of the area.
When we enter the town, we leave a passerby that requests instructions to the house of Sufyan Gorsi and Atif Shehzad, two of the men who perished in a tragedy in a migrant boat off the coast of Morocco in January.
The young man identifies as a resident of the Italian city of Bologna; Most families in this town have one or more members established in the Gulf or Europe region.
The two were among the 43 unfortunate Pakistani who perished on the proverbial road to El Dorado; A total of seven people from Gujrat and Mandi Bahauddin were among the victims, while 22 managed to survive and get home.
Sufyan and Atif were cousins, and the first had been raised by their uncle since their own parents died in 2004. Both were also married; Sufyan has a daughter and two children, the eldest son of only five years. I was playing with other children in the latrine when we arrived.
Atif’s father told us that he had lived in Dubai for 30 years, while Atif’s younger brother still works there. The unfortunate young man had spent about a decade working on the Emirates.
“If someone is not highly educated, they are sent abroad for work. Parents send their young people abroad to save them from a bad company, ”says their maternal uncle Chaudhry Ahsan Gorsi, who also lived and worked in Dubai for 22 years before returning to his native village.
He now directs a cattle and dairy business here, but his older brother still works in Dubai.
Most people go abroad in their adolescence with manipulated documents so that they are eligible to work in foreign lands. Atif’s age was similarly improved in four years to ensure that he could get a job while he was abroad.
Keep up with the jones
Although everyone knows what challenges and dangers are waiting for these ambitious young people on their trip to Europe, there are rarely doubts when it comes to financing a trip to the West.
According to Chaudhry Ahsan Gorsi, all who do the walk to Europe have to sell some lands to support expenses. Around RS4 million are needed to finance a person’s trip, which would be impossible to generate otherwise. This is what the two young people also did.
“In the Gujrat and Mandi Bahauddin area, almost 30 percent of the population consists of [families of] Expatriated. Those who live here have close relatives who are established abroad. If a family member arrives there, he stops others behind him, ”says FIA Gujranwala director Abdul Qadir Qammar.
There are also several success stories of people who took the illegal route and finally made it large, which is an important attraction for many possible migrants, he says.
“They see great mansions built around them by families whose members have managed to reach Europe, and want to follow the same path,” he says.
Both Atif and Sufyan left home on August 4, 2024, and remained in Mauritania until January, waiting for their journey to Spain.
“They left Mauritania for Europe on January 2, when they approached the boat and asked us to pray for them. His friends had arrived in Europe a week before, and we expected them to reach their destination in four days, ”recalled Chaudhry Ahsan Gorsi.
“We received the news that immigrants had landed in Spain on January 6, but the website only gives the number of people who arrived, does not give details of their nationalities.”
The family hoped that they establish contact on January 7, but when this did not happen, they worried.
“We use our own contact on another island and ask you to get details … [he] We arrived there on the 10th … on the 13th we received the news that there was an incident that involved a boat near the Canary Islands where people fell into the sea, but they had been rescued. The details were scarce and we thought they had been arrested by the Moroccan authorities and would be imprisoned for a year, ”he said.
“Our agent told us that the Moroccan authorities had arrested them and that he was personally going to help.”
His agent was Fahad Gujjar, resident of the neighboring town of Jorra. Since then he has been declared a proclaimed criminal, while his mother has also been arrested for his participation in human trafficking.
It was on the night of January 15 that the agent told the family that Atif and Sufyan had perished. The next day, they received the news that Suffyan’s body had been found, but Atif did not recover.
Fight with traffickers
According to Gorsi, a survivor of the same village told them that everything went well for three days. But when they approached Spain, African traffickers on board wanted to turn the boat to Morocco.
There were about 100 souls on board, while around 25 of them were Africans. Once outside the coast of Morocco, they stopped the boat in the sea and began to take vests of the life of the on -board. They also snatched the supply of fruit and dry water.
“At night, they rose and began to tie healthy immigrants and torture them. When they came to beat Atif, Sufyan intervened and hit him strongly, inflicting a deep injury to his eye. This happened on January 10. They killed Atif and threw their body into the sea, while suffering survived for three or four days. “
Ahsan said he had come to know that there were some financial problems among the agents, which caused the tragedy.
It was said that another reason was the death of Zaheeruddin Babar, a resident of Kurrianwala, a town near Dhola.
He died of a heart attack in the boat, and the traffickers wanted to throw their body into the water, but the Pakistani on board opposed, which offended the traffickers.
Gorsi said Sufyan was still alive when help finally came, but could not survive the terrible experience.
With the dangers of illegally crossing the known Mediterranean, why do migrants persevere on this route?
According to Mr. Qamar, director of the FIA, there has been a change in route preferences; Previously, people preferred road routes through Iran and Türkiye. These have been abandoned or rarely used.
“A great reason is more restrictions and fences on the border of Iran-Pakistan. There are more risks involved in border crossings. “
There are different costs to cross through land and sea; The Tour of the Earth costs around RS20M, while the Route from the sea to Africa costs double, around RS40m.
“In recent years, the trend of border crossings has decreased. Illegal immigrants have changed to air trips; For example, people go to Saudi Arabia under the pretext of performing Umrah, and then flying to Europe from there. “
The FIA states that he has locked dozens of alleged human smuggers, including 17 sought by Interpol and 163 proclaimed criminals.
The agency has also established link offices in Spain, Italy, Greece and Iran, where 18 and 19 officers have been published to work in coordination with local authorities.
But despite their best efforts, the thrust and jump factors that promote people to try their luck in these dangerous and illegal migrant crosses continue to persist. Unless international networks that exploit those who dream of a better life in the West are dismantled worldwide, there may be more tragedies.
Posted in Dawn, February 17, 2025
