The Federal Investigation Agency has arrested the alleged ringleader of a human traffickers syndicate that sent two Pakistanis on a migrant boat that capsised off the coast of Greece resulting in the killing of at least 82 while some 500 were presumed dead including 209 Pakistanis.
A spokesperson for the FIA said that the Anti-Human Trafficking Circle Rawalpindi and the Counter Terrorism Department on Sunday carried out a joint raid in Umerkot City of Sindh to arrest the suspect identified as Faizaullah.
The overloaded boat capsised off the Greek coast while carrying as many as 750 people on June 14 in one of the worst migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea. Only 104 men survived the tragedy while 82 bodies were recovered.
According to the FIA spokesperson, the suspect took millions from a citizen to send his son and nephew to Italy through the migrant boat.
He alleged that Faizuallah’s accomplices took the two Pakistanis to the ship. However, they went missing when the migrant ship capsised in the Mediterranean Sea.
There were at least 209 Pakistani victims on an overloaded boat, data shared with Reuters by a Pakistani investigative agency on June 22 showed.
Read: Pakistani man who lived in Germany for 15 years among the missing in boat tragedy
The data shared by the FIA said 181 were from Pakistan and 28 from Pakistan-administered Kashmir, adding that DNA samples from 201 families had been gathered by officials to help Greece identify those missing.
