A high-profile asylum-seeking family who were deported from Australia after a five-year battle arrived safely in Pakistan but have since disappeared, officials said on Tuesday. Ali and Roqia Bakhtiari and their six children were flown to Islamabad late last week after Canberra, known for its tough, much-criticised stance on immigration, rejected their claims that they were ethnically-oppressed Afghans. "A family deported from Australia arrived in Islamabad on Sunday," a Pakistani immigration official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "We allowed them to go after someone furnished a personal guarantee that they would return for investigations," he said, but declined to identify the guarantor.
| So how'd he "guarantee" their appearance? And what happens to him if they don't show? |
The official said the family "might" have gone to Quetta, which is near the Afghan border, but could not confirm that they had. The Bakhtiaris arrived in Australia in 1999 and became a symbol of the fight against the conservative government's policy of indefinite, mandatory detention for all unwanted asylum-seekers - a stance widely criticised by civil libertarians at home and abroad. They lodged some 20 unsuccessful legal challenges for asylum, insisting they were from Afghanistan's ethnic Hazara community, a Shia minority oppressed by the former Taliban regime.
| We can sympathize, but the Talibs aren't running things in Afghanistan anymore. They're back safe in... uhhh... Quetta. |
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