Combating coronavirus: Pakistan announces UAE repatriation flight schedule for June.

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Pakistan’s Ministry of Overseas and Human Resources Development has announced that 27 flights will be operated during the first 10 days of June to bring thousands of its stranded citizen back from the UAE.

Pakistan’s national airline PIA will operate 20 special flights while the UAE carriers will fly the remaining seven flights to six major cities of Pakistan. Around nine flights will operate to Multan, five to Peshawar, four each to Lahore and Multan, three to Karachi and two to Islamabad in the first 10 days of next month.

The ministry has been regularly issuing 10-day special repatriation flight schedule since the outbreak of Covid-19 after international flights were suspended by Pakistan and other countries.

In total, Pakistan’s Ministry of Overseas and HRD announced 62 special flights between June 1 to 10 to over dozen countries to repatriated stranded citizens including the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, China, the USA, the UK, Jordan, Mauritania/Sierra Leone, Thailand, Tunisia, Canada and Iraq.

From the UAE, five flights have been added to the next 10 days of schedule when compared to previous 10-day schedule of May 22 to 31.

Globally, over 100,000 Pakistanis were stranded due to flight disruptions across 88 countries with majority of them in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Thousands of people have already been repatriated through the national carrier and the government has expedited the repatriation process.

Zulfi Bukhari, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Overseas Pakistanis, has said that repatriation of Pakistanis from the UAE is the top priority of the government due to large of people stranded here in the UAE. Around 63,000 people had registered for repatriation with the Pakistan Consulate Dubai. Around 12,000 have already been repatriated from the UAE through special flights and 8,000 of them were flown back by 40 special PIA flights in the past 40 days.

Senior officials said these are preliminary schedules and are subject to change, depending on the approval of governments and operational changes due to coronavirus.