Former FBI spy barred from entering Pakistan

LONDON: Pakistani authorities deported a former FBI informant, Kamran Faridi, and didn’t allow him entry into the country on “national security grounds”, reliable sources said.

Officials confirmed to Geo News that Kamran, the Karachi-born former Peoples Student Federation (PSF) activist who went to work for the FBI on several spying missions, including inside Pakistan, was refused entry into Pakistan after he reached Karachi with his American wife, Kelly Faridi.

Kamran is currently based in a Middle Eastern country after his deportation from Pakistan. Kamran claimed that he was detained and kept at an unknown Karachi location for nearly four months — and interrogated but not tortured.

He said, “When our plane landed in Karachi, we were met by the government officials waiting at the gate. Without explanation, they guided us through a series of back corridors and out of public view, leading us into an aircraft hangar. All our personal belongings — phones, my wife’s purse, even the jewellery we were wearing — were taken from us.

“We were taken to a house. Our room had cameras even in places where we changed clothes. Every move we made was being watched. When we needed to leave the room, we had to be escorted. We were never alone unless it was within the confines of that locked, monitored space.

“The questioning began the next morning, and continued every day after that. We were interrogated separately and together. After months in confinement, they told us we would be released. They placed black hoods over our heads and took us, once again, in separate vehicles, to the airport. We were flown to Islamabad, but instead of freedom, we were taken to another house. There, the same cycle began again.”

Kamran claimed they were deported from the country after his wife and relatives threatened to contact the US embassy. “After nearly four months of confinement, questioning, and constant surveillance, we were free — but forever changed by what we had endured.”

Kamran was jailed on December 9, 2022, on charges of transmitting threats to three former FBI colleagues — his FBI supervisor, an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) officer, and his former FBI handler, who had recently retired — in New York’s Westchester County, where JTTF headquarters is located. He was released from a Florida prison in early May 2024, after serving nearly four years of his sentence.