A police officer keeps watch as all trains towards Boston were cancelled at Pennsylvania Station, in New York, on April, 19, 2013. All trains in and out of Boston were suspended due to a manhunt for a Boston Marathon bombing suspect. Thousands of heavily armed police staged an intense manhunt Friday in Watertown, Massachusetts, for a Chechen teenager suspected in the Boston marathon bombings with his brother, who was killed in a shootout. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, defied the massive force after his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan was shot and suffered critical injuries from explosives believed to have been strapped to his body. AFP PHOTO / EMMANUEL DUNAND (Photo credit should read EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON: The US on Wednesday imposed sanctions on an alleged Pakistan-based human smuggling organisation, accusing it of being involved in smuggling migrants to the United States, including foreign nationals that may pose a national security risk.

The move comes as a sharp increase in apprehensions on the US-Mexico border has posed one of the biggest political challenges to the new administration of US President Joe Biden. The US Treasury Department in a statement said it blacklisted Pakistani national Abid Ali Khan and what it dubbed the Abid Ali Khan Transnational Criminal Organisation, which the Treasury accused of being “a prolific human smuggling organisation”, as well as three people and one entity associated with the organisation.

Khan was also indicted on Wednesday by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia for allegedly leading the effort to smuggle undocumented people into the United States from Pakistan and Afghanistan. “Abid Ali Kahn allegedly organised and leads a widespread smuggling organisation that facilitates the illegal smuggling of individuals through various countries and to the United States,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas McQuaid of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in the statement.

The Treasury said the organisation has facilitated the smuggling of foreign nationals using various routes through Latin America since at least 2015. Khan and members of the organisation coordinate smuggling of foreign nationals to the United States for an average cost of $20,000 per individual, according to the statement.

It said the organisation frequently uses a travel route that begins in Pakistan or Afghanistan and transits through several South and Central American countries before arriving at the southern border of the United States, often providing fraudulently obtained passports to clients.

Wednesday’s move freezes any US assets of those blacklisted and generally bars Americans from dealing with them. Khan did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment sent to email addresses listed by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here