After the lid was blown over a visa scandal, Pakistan’s Foreign Office on Monday ordered its European embassies to not issue visas to Afghan citizens until further notice.
The FO has ordered embassies in the UK, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands to not issue the visas, according to Pakistani media reports.
Notably, the decision was prompted after 1,600 visas were issued to Afghan nationals by the Pakistan embassy in Sweden based on fake residence cards.
After the news of the visa scandal broke on Pakistani news channels, the foreign ministry swung into action and launched an inquiry into how the visas were issued so carelessly by the Pakistan mission.
This is not the first instance where Afghan nationals have entered Pakistan using bogus documents. Last year, it was reported that people attempting to flee the clutches of the Taliban were paying as much as $700 for a yearlong visa to Pakistan.
The tensions between the two countries have been running high, especially after the Peshawar bomb blast. Islamabad is of the view that the Taliban regime in Kabul is pulling the strings of TTP in Pakistan.
TTP, a rogue terrorist outfit, fashioned on the lines of the Afghan Taliban is miffed with the current Shehbaz Sharif administration for not meeting its demands.
The talks between the government and TTP collapsed in August last year. During the talks, TTP refused to budge on its demand for the reversal of the merger of Federally Administered Tribal Areas with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
Since then, TTP has gone on a rampage, conducting fatal bomb blasts one after another. Islamabad is wary that the influx of Afghan nationals on bogus visas could exacerbate the current situation.
(With inputs from agencies)
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