Muhammad Ali and his cousin Ghulam Ali travelled 13 dangerous hours from Quetta City to Islamabad this week to give Australian officials the DNA samples likely to confirm the news they prayed would never come.
The men's brothers are believed to be the last victims to be identified of 17 dead asylum-seekers recovered from the Indian Ocean last June, after a criminally overloaded fishing trawler sank on its way to Christmas Island.
In all, 94 people are believed to have drowned.
Pakistani authorities this week arrested four key members of the people-smuggling ring responsible for cramming 204 people -- mostly from Pakistan's persecuted Shia minority -- on to the Indonesian trawler built to carry no more than 60 for the final leg of their Australian asylum bid.
The Federal Investigation Agency responsible for the arrests says it hopes to see more people detained as it shares information with its counterparts in Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia. Digital Pass $1 for first 28 Days
That is little comfort for Muhammad and Ghulam who scraped together money "from here and there" last year to send their younger brothers out of violence-racked Quetta, a death trap for so many Hazara Shia muslims now being targeted in escalating numbers by Sunni extremists.
Should the tests confirm the last two bodies in a Perth morgue are those of Khadim Hussain, 26, and Safar Ali, 25, it will draw a line under one of the most tragic episodes in the politicised calamity that has been Australia's asylum-seeker experience.
In a tired-looking hotel room in Islamabad's Blue Area, Ghulam points to his brother Khadim's six-year-old son Asif who -- as the closest male relative -- travelled with his uncle to give blood and saliva samples this week.
"He cried when they took his blood but he doesn't understand what's going on," Ghulam told The Weekend Australian. "He sometimes asks me 'where is my father?' and I tell him he is in Australia."
And that is where Ghulam insists his brother should stay.
Both men say they will not accept their brothers' repatriation, because after 10 months their bodies will be too badly decomposed for their families to see.
Instead they want the Australian government to send them to Perth so that they may oversee the burials in the country the men had hoped would one day be home.
It is a desperate and long-shot bid at asylum and they make little attempt to disguise the fact.
Both Afghan families live illegally in Pakistan and have little hope of citizenship, given the Pakistani government's vow to evict a million illegal Afghan migrants from the country by 2014.
Khadim and Safar had worked in Shia Iran, earning money for their families, but were deported.
They might have gone back but the assassination last year of a busload of Hazara pilgrims rendered that road yet another no-go zone. In recent years target killings of Hazaras -- easily identified by their Asian features -- have escalated in Quetta. Those attacks have turned even deadlier since January with more than 200 Hazaras killed in three attacks.
Saturday 13 April 2013
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/family-gives-dna-to-help-identify-bodies/story-e6frg6so-1226619464355
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