RAWALPINDI, June 29: Twenty of the 132 Pakistanis deported from the United States spent an additional period of almost six months in jail because of administrative delays on the part of the US Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS), a source told Dawn on Saturday.

They had been rounded up after the 9/11 incident and were supposed to be deported in December last year, he said.

The US authorities had deported 280 Pakistanis individually following the 9/11 incident, the source said. The 132 persons, who were deported on June 27, were the first to be deported collectively, he added.

The authorities, the source said, had planned to deport 163 persons, but around 18 people in New York jails, got stay orders against their deportation after they came to know about this decision. Some others, he said, could not be deported because of certain legal complications.

He said there was another batch of 60 Pakistanis that would soon be deported. He said over 70 families had been affected as a result of the deportation.

“Almost 70 per cent of the deported persons had married in the US and their American wives and children have been left behind,” the source said, and added that atleast four women, some alongwith their children, were on their way to join their husbands in Pakistan.

Documents of American authorities provided to this reporter revealed that out of the 132 persons deported on June 27, 109 had no criminal charges against them. The criminal history of others showed that six had been booked on charges of fraud, three each on larceny and drug-related offences, five on immigration laws violation and the remaining on charges of sexual assault.

However, according to a statement delivered to this reporter by the second secretary at the Pakistan embassy in the US, Imran Ali, who escorted the deportees, “Of the 132 detainees, 110 were convicted of immigration laws violations, like visa overstay, illegal entry and not obeying previous deportation orders, while the other 22 had been convicted of crimes like credit card fraud, narcotics, robbery and assault.”

“All the detainees repatriated through this flight had been deported on the orders of the US immigration judges after passing through the due process of law,” the statement further said.

Imran Ali said it had been planned to remove the confines of the deportees after boarding them on a chartered flight, but one of them assaulted a US official due to which they were made to wear specially-made flexible cuffs.

He said the detainees were not subjected to torture during the course of detention, but agreed that the mental torture suffered by them could not be ruled out.

“Staying in jail with an uncertain future is itself a torture,” the official said.

The entire operation of June 27 deportation of 132 Pakistanis spanned over three days and involved 289 US officials, 30 of whom accompanied the deportees on the chartered flight to Pakistan.

Rounding up the detainees from nine diverse locations at the US military base in Louisiana, from where they boarded a chartered flight for Pakistan, cost the US authorities over $1 million.