Confessions of a People-Smuggler by Amiri Dawood

Author:Amiri, Dawood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000, POL000000, SOC007000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2014-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

10

SMUGGLING AGAIN

Another mastermind within the smugglers’ networks went by the name of ‘Zahid Nanna’. I call him a mastermind because during a few operations I had worked on under Javed Billu, I had also taken orders from Nanna.

But I had only ever heard his voice while movements were taking place, and he always called my phone from a private number. Only once did I get the chance to see him, from a distance of almost six metres. He never talked to the boat passengers, nor did he show his face to any other person, except the guys in the network. He was a close friend, or a relative, of Billu — I wasn’t sure which, because Billu never introduced us properly. I felt that he must have been sharing a good proportion of the profits with Billu, seeing as he was heavily involved in the operations. Once, right in the middle of an operation, at the start of my work with Billu, I ran out of the pocket money that I used to pay for the passengers’ expenses. It was Nanna who immediately transferred $200 to my wife’s ATM account when I told him that I needed money urgently.

During my third month in the lock-up, Nanna asked for my telephone number from some of his friends in Quetta, and one day, very unexpectedly, he called me. He asked about my monetary situation and miserable prison life, and transferred another $500 into my wife’s account. He was not my boss, nor my friend; he was just a network member. I was confused then, but accepted his charity, since I was in need. I just thought that perhaps he was a good guy who wanted to help me, as a network friend, due to my bad situation.

After a few more days he called again, and we had a brief conversation about Billu. He told me that Billu was a bad guy, though a business partner of his from a long time before. He said that Billu was a cheat and a bastard, and that the boat which sank was totally Billu’s fault; all the workers had told him not to load more than 150 passengers, but he hadn’t listened and had loaded more than 200 passengers by force. Billu apparently had remarked that we would have lost a lot of money if we’d only loaded 150 people.

I listened silently to Nanna’s stories. In a third call, he told me that he knew I had many connections with Pakistani and Afghan agents, and that if I could get hold of passengers for him from some of these agents, I would earn a good commission. He said that he had a boat ready to go in the next few days, but only a few passengers lined up for it. He needed more, and asked if I could arrange them for him. He had approached me because he did not know anyone else who could do the job, he said, and he couldn’t recruit anyone new because he was not offering an advance payment.

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