LONDON: The legal team assisting the 10 Pakistani students fighting deportation is negotiating with the border authorities for providing educational facilities to the detainees while they await the normally lengthy legal process to complete.
The legal team is also said to be trying to enable those of the 10 who have completed their courses to appear in their final examinations while in detention.
The 10 students were arrested early last month on suspicion of being involved in plotting terrorist attacks in the UK, but released for want of actionable evidence and handed over to border authorities for deportation.
The students went into appeal against deportation orders and are now awaiting their cases to come up for hearing.
The UK authorities are said to have taken the position that out of the 10 only three were genuine students while the rest were alleged to have obtained student visas on false documents with no record of admission in any of the registered institutions in the UK and were found to be working without the valid permission.
Sources close to the legal team of the 10 students said that even if that were true, the UK authorities had no right to stigmatise them with terror charges for which the UK government needed to tender a public apology and grant reasonable monetary compensation to the aggrieved students.
The official position of the UK has not changed since the 10 students were arrested as only on Monday Foreign Secretary David Miliband while talking to the media after his meeting with Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi implied that the 10 were arrested on some concrete evidence which meant that there was evidence of their involvement in the so-called terror plot but that evidence was not strong enough to stand in the court of law.
However, the students’ legal team is said to believe that the arrests were made on some false tip-off from some dubious but motivated informant having some personal grudge against all or some of the arrested students.
‘If they had even an iota of evidence even remotely linking them to the so-called terror plot they would certainly have shared it with the Pakistani authorities and would not have insisted that if these students were deported to Pakistan they would not be persecuted,’ said Sibghatuallah Kadri QC.
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/12-students-contesting-deportation-seek-educational-facility--bi-12
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