Ninety-two nurses, forged experience certificates, deported within a month: the agent sentenced in Rawalpindi to concurrent terms totalling 41 years, September 2026

Pakistan sends thousands of nurses to Gulf hospitals every year, and the documents a foreign employer relies on, a diploma, a Pakistan Nursing Council (PNC) licence and an experience certificate, usually pass through a recruiting agent licensed by the Bureau of Emigration. Those papers are easy to forge and slow to check. A case involving 92 nurses, first reported in March 2024, ended with convictions in a Rawalpindi court in September 2026.

According to the Associated Press of Pakistan (27 September 2026), the Special Court (Central) in Rawalpindi, judge Abdul Rehman Muhammad Arif presiding, convicted two men in FIR No. 103/2024 of the FIA Anti-Corruption Circle Islamabad. The main accused, Ghulam Zulfiqar Ali, alias Mian Zulfiqar, received seven years' rigorous imprisonment on each of three Pakistan Penal Code counts (cheating, forgery and using forged documents) with Rs100,000 fines, and ten years on each of two counts under the Emigration Ordinance 1979 with Rs200,000 fines, all to run concurrently. Under section 544-A of the Code of Criminal Procedure he was ordered to pay Rs100,000 to each of the 92 nurses, Rs9.2 million in all, through the Director FIA Islamabad. A second accused, Ghulam Farid, received three years and a Rs200,000 fine under one Emigration Ordinance section and was acquitted on the other counts. Both were sent to Central Jail Rawalpindi. APP said the nurses had been sent to Saudi Arabia on fake experience certificates and deported within about a month of arrival.

Minute Mirror (28 October 2026) reported the FIA's briefing to the Senate Functional Committee on Human Rights, chaired by Senator Samina Mumtaz Zehri, which gave the sentencing date as 23 September 2026 and the combined term as 41 years. The FIA also told senators that six allegedly fake nursing institutions in Islamabad had been sealed after a PNC complaint, that 268 institutions were inspected between February and April, and that 64 suspects, including PNC employees, had been booked in four months, with 40 arrests. Brandsynario (20 March 2024) had reported the deportations when they happened: a private recruiter in Rawalpindi submitted forged online verification reports for the nurses, routine online checks by the Saudi government exposed them, and the Ministry of Overseas Pakistanis suspended and blacklisted the recruiter's licence. That report said the nurses had worked in Saudi Arabia for about a year before the forgery surfaced, while APP put the deportation at about a month after arrival.

The mechanism was a recruiter who controlled every document the employer saw. Verification reports that should have come from the issuing authority came from the agent, and the forgery only surfaced when Saudi authorities ran their own online checks. The nurses lost their jobs; the agent kept the fees until a court ordered him to pay them back.

For any health worker going abroad, insist that your licence and experience are verified directly between the regulator and the employer, never through an agent's copy. Check the agent's licence with the Bureau of Emigration, keep your originals, and treat any offer that depends on documents you did not earn as a trap, because the deportation falls on you, not the recruiter.