Court seeks charge sheet against five Iranians held with fake documents

A federal anti-corruption court on Monday sought a charge sheet against five Iranian nationals who were allegedly using forged Pakistani documents for travelling to Bahrain and were caught there.

The Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) produced seven people, identified as Sajid, Abdullah, Farid, Abdur Raheem, Abu Bakr, Ahmed and Abdul Wahab, before the anti-corruption court and informed it that the interrogations had almost been completed.

According to the prosecution, the suspects in connivance with some officials at the National Database Registration Authority (Nadra) and the Directorate General of Immigration and Passports had obtained fake documents against bribes.

They were arrested in December 2018 at the Turbat International Airport after being deported from Bahrain. The FIA said the suspects could not give any convincing answers to the questions asked by officials at the airport.

Initially, they claimed to belong to different districts in Balochistan but could not speak any local language nor did they look similar to their attesting families, the FIA added. Later, the suspects admitted to having got the documents against paying money to Nadra and passport authority officials.

The investigators said that the documents were obtained from different offices of Nadra in Karachi over fake birth certificates and family trees. They said that the suspects paid around Rs300,000 for each Computerised National Identity Card.

The suspects had been travelling to and from Bahrain on fake documents since 2014 and were caught by Bahrani police over criminal charges in July 2018, the FIA said, adding that they belonged to the Sistan-Baluchestan province of Iran. The judge directed the FIA to produce the charge sheet against the suspects by July 1 and remanded them back to the prison in judicial custody until then.