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| Sunday, 24 March 2002 |
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US
searches for four missing Pakistanis from ship
WASHINGTON, Saturday (Reuters) The U.S. immigration agency, under fire over student visa approvals for two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, gave visa waivers to four Pakistanis who arrived in Virginia on a Russian ship and have since disappeared, a Justice Department official said on Friday. The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and the FBI were searching for the four missing Pakistanis, who arrived in Norfolk on March 16, the official said, adding that they never came back to the ship when it later departed for Savannah, Georgia. None of the four have been linked to any "terrorist or criminal-related" activities in various U.S. databases, the official said. An INS official in Norfolk entered the wrong birth date for one of the four Pakistanis, the Justice Department official said. If the right date had been entered, the INS would have learned the Pakistani had an immigration violation in Chicago from several years ago, the official said. The official said the INS was reviewing the case. The agency was already under fire for an earlier blunder involving the visas for the hijackers. On March 13, six months after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon by hijacked planes, the Florida flight school where two of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, were trained received notification from the INS that their student visas had been approved. |
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