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Travelers say they were treated poorly and authorities wouldn’t explain why.
BY Mahnoor | 22-05-2026
RAWALPINDI:
Recent incidents at the New Islamabad International Airport raise concerns about the FIA’s immigration wing. Passengers with proper documents were removed from flights, allegedly due to inexperience, carelessness, and poor management.
Passengers complained that both junior and senior immigration staff didn’t handle the problem well. Two Pakistani citizens, traveling separately to South Africa and Turkey, said they were wrongly stopped from boarding, even though they had all the correct papers.
Travelers claimed that FIA immigration staff acted rudely and didn’t properly explain why people were removed from flights.
We tried to get a comment from Hina Munawar, the Deputy Director of Immigration at the New Islamabad International Airport, and the FIA spokesperson, but neither provided an official response, even after we asked many times.
A traveler named Shehzad Gondal filmed a video at the airport that became popular online. In the video, he says he had a valid South African visa to travel from Islamabad to Cape Town. He also had hotel reservations, a return plane ticket said to cost Rs550,000, and about $1,500 for his trip.
Gondal said he traveled a lot in the last 20 years and his passport has many visas and travel stamps. But, he said FIA immigration stopped him without a good reason, saying many times that South Africa doesn’t allow Pakistanis with new visas to travel there.
The passenger questioned the decision, arguing that since South Africa gave him a visa after he paid the fee in dollars, only South African officials, not Pakistani officials, should decide if he should be deported.
He also said that even after waiting a long time and asking many times, he couldn’t meet with the deputy director. She supposedly refused to see him from inside her office. Gondal asked the Interior Minister and the FIA Director General to look into this and make sure justice is served.
In a separate recent incident, a metal trader named Abrar claimed he was also removed from a flight at Lahore airport. He said immigration officers took issue with a travel agent’s TikTok video they saw on his phone.
He said that after going to Islamabad and getting his travel papers checked by an FIA office, he tried to fly out of Islamabad airport again, but was stopped.
He also claimed that an immigration officer from the FIA ripped his boarding pass. He said he begged for it back so he could get a refund for his plane ticket.
Even after trying many times to reach immigration officials at the FIA about the complaints and passenger videos that everyone is sharing, we hadn’t received an official answer when this report was written.
