LAHORE: Last week, after bargaining for hours with more than a dozen goldsmiths in Lahore’s largest gold market, the famed Rang Mahal bazar, Maulvi Jamshaid finally returned home with a 10 kg bag of dirt he had bought for 100,000 Pakistani rupees ($487).

But why did he pay such a hefty sum for a sack of dirt?

Jamshaid, 55, comes from a long line of niyarias, or gold scavengers, who do the often filthy, always painstaking work of extracting gold — and other precious metals such as platinum, palladium and silver — from literally anything one can find in a goldsmith’s workshop — including dirt.

The grinding, filing, polishing and buffing processes required to make jewelry send microscopic clouds of precious dust flying into the air, Jamshaid explained, which ultimately settles down on mats, carpets, earthen pots used to melt metals, tools and floors at Rang Mahal’s gold shops.

It was always a hard bargain, Jamshaid said, to convince goldsmiths to let him sweep the floors of their shops for dust and filth that may contain minute particles of gold. Often, the niyarias also scour out gold dust from sewerage drains.

“I couldn’t afford to buy the other scrap from the workshop so I only bought the dirt collected there,” Jamshaid told Arab News at his rented home in Gumti Bazar, as he sat down with his 10-year-old son, who is also learning the trade, to begin to extract gold.

Gold is trading at historic high rates in Pakistan, mainly due to price fluctuations in the global bullion market. Twenty-four karat gold was trading in Pakistan at $690 per tola (12.6 grams) on Tuesday. The highest level of $695 was hit last week.

The Pakistani bullion market follows the international gold market. Gold rates in the international market were $1,822 per ounce on Tuesday. The yellow metal hit a high of $2,052 an ounce in March this year.

But despite having paid almost $500 dollars for his sack of dirt, Jamshaid, who has for decades practiced the occupation he inherited from his forefathers, said he had a feeling he had struck a good deal this time.

“At least 17 grams of gold are there in this dirt,” he said. “My experience tells me that.”

To extract the gold, Jamshaid pours the dirt into a metal tub on his rooftop and mixes in nitric acid until precious yellow slivers, sometimes barely visible to the naked eye, separate.

The gold scavenger’s hands and upper arms bear signs of years spent in this thankless line of work, with burns in many places from the toxic chemicals that are an integral part of the process.

To the health hazards of the craft, a new fear has recently been added: That technology will render the niyaria’s skill redundant.

“I think machines will soon take the majority of jobs away from these people, because now the latest machines can sift gold from anything, tell the amount of gold in anything,” goldsmith Asim Ali, who also owns a testing laboratory, told Arab News. “They’re not so common in Pakistan but soon, I fear, they will be.”

But Ali added it was in the goldsmiths’ interest to help sustain the niyaria profession since it protected against pilferage by their own workers. “If they stole items with small amounts of gold embedded in it, without niyarias to extract it, they would not be able to sell it.”

“So most of the goldsmiths maintain their cordiality with these scavengers . . . just in case there is pilferage from their shops,” the goldsmith said.

But Jamshaid does not appreciate the good faith. From his perspective, niyarias feed their children literally by “washing the dirt off the feet of goldsmiths.”

And poverty keeps them trapped in the profession.”I’m making my son learn this trade as I cannot send him to school. But he will help me earn more in the future,” he said.

Then, as the first glitter of yellow appeared on the surface of the gray dirt in the tub, Jamshaid exclaimed: “Look! This is a relatively big speck of gold. I knew I had made a good deal!”

LONDON: The daughter of an Iranian-British-American tri-national imprisoned in Iran has accused the UK government of ignoring her family’s case after delivering a Father’s Day message to the UK Foreign Office.

Roxanne Tahbaz visited the Foreign Office to demand further information about the case of her father, 66-year-old Morad Tahbaz, who has been imprisoned by Tehran for more than four years.

She claimed that her appeal was transferred to an official, who said that they would pass on her message.

She said: “It was incredibly dispiriting. Father’s Day is the hardest day of all. While every day is challenging, special moments like holidays and birthdays are especially difficult for me and my siblings.

“Our father has been unjustly jailed in Iran for nearly four-and-a-half years, but (UK foreign secretary) Liz Truss and the government still haven’t informed us what they’re doing to secure his release.”

Roxanne Tahbaz said that the Foreign Office is offering token gestures in an attempt to delay her appeals.

“There doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency — nothing to suggest the foreign secretary and her office feel they need to get my father out of prison immediately,” she added.

“On Thursday, Amnesty accompanied me as I took a Father’s Day card and gift to the Foreign Office. To our dismay, neither the foreign secretary nor a minister would meet us. Instead we were greeted by another member of their team who said they’d pass on our concerns.

“It feels like the government continually attempts to placate us with pleasantries and false promises.”

The Foreign Office is said to be communicating with Morad Tahbaz’s sister-in-law as well as his wife.

In March, the UK government reached a deal with Iran to secure Morad Tahbaz’s furlough, as well as the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori.

That deal involved negotiations over a decades-old military debt totaling almost $500 million owed by the UK to Iran.

Just after being granted furlough, however, Tahbaz — a prominent conservationist who was arrested during a 2018 crackdown — was forced to return to prison.

Roxanne Tahbaz has long campaigned for her father’s release, and has repeatedly claimed that the UK Foreign Office has ignored her requests for help.

After a demonstration in April, she said: “We want them to follow through on the promise they made to us.

“We were always led to believe over the past four years that he was to be a part of any deal they were making, and we were led to believe he’d be coming home as part of that.”

BRUSSELS: Russia is putting the world at risk of famine through its blockade of Ukraine’s shipments of grains and restrictions on its own exports, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Saturday. The threat to food security and a “battle of narrative” with Russia on Western-imposed sanctions on Moscow over Ukraine will dominate European Union foreign ministers’ talks in Luxembourg on Monday. “We are ready to work with the UN and our partners to prevent any unwanted impact on global food security,” Borrell said in an article published on his official blog. “Russia’s conscious political choice is to ‘weaponize’” grain exports and “use them as a tool for blackmail against anyone that opposes its aggression” in Ukraine, Borrell said. “Russia turned the Black Sea into a war zone, blocking shipments of grain and fertilizer from Ukraine but also affecting Russian merchant shipping. Russia is also applying quotas and taxes on its grain exports,” he added. The sanctions imposed by the EU “do not prohibit Russia to export any agricultural goods, payment for such Russian exports or the provision of seeds, provided that sanctioned individuals or entities are not involved.” “We are fully aware that there is a ‘battle of narratives’ around this issue” of sanctions, Borrell continued. He added that it was imperative that Ukrainian exports be allowed to resume by ship. “We are working closely with the UN on this issue and the EU and its member states are ready to do their part of the necessary actions to achieve this. “We hope that a solution can be found in the coming days. Not doing this threatens to cause a global food catastrophe,” he warned.

PARIS: Spain, France and other western European nations braced on Saturday for a sweltering June weekend that is set to break records, with forest fires and warnings over the effects of climate change. The weather on Saturday will represent a peak of a June heatwave that is in line with scientists’ predictions that such phenomena will now strike earlier in the year thanks to global warming. Forest fires in Spain on Saturday had burned nearly 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of land in the north-west Sierra de la Culebra region. The flames forced several hundred people from their homes, and 14 villages were evacuated. Some residents were able to return on Saturday morning, but regional authorities warned the fire “remains active.” Firefighters were still battling blazes in several other regions, including woodlands in Catalonia. Temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) were forecast in parts of the country on Saturday — with highs of 43 degrees C expected in the north-eastern city of Zaragoza. There have also been fires in Germany, where temperatures topped 40 degrees C on Saturday. A blaze in the Brandenburg region around Berlin had spread over about 60 hectares by Friday evening. Temperatures in France could reach as high as 42 degrees C in some areas on Saturday, French state weather forecaster Meteo France said, adding that June records had already been beaten in 11 areas on Friday. Farmers in the country are having to adapt. Daniel Toffaloni, a 60-year-old farmer near the southern city of Perpignan, now only works from “daybreak until 11.30am” and in the evening, as temperatures in his tomato greenhouses reach a sizzling 55 degrees C. “This is the earliest heatwave ever recorded in France” since 1947, said Matthieu Sorel, a climatologist at Meteo France. With “many monthly or even all-time temperature records likely to be beaten in several regions,” he called the weather a “marker of climate change.” Dutch authorities said they expect Saturday to be the hottest day of the year so far. The Netherlands’ national meteorological agency has issued a warning for the southern city of Limburg where temperatures could rise to 35 degrees C. “The elderly and people with vulnerable health can develop health problems due to the heat,” the agency said. The UK recorded its hottest day of the year on Friday with temperatures reaching over 30 degrees C in the early afternoon, meteorologists said. Several towns in northern Italy have announced water rationing and the Lombardy region may declare a state of emergency as a record drought threatens harvests. Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN convention charged with reversing land degradation, on Friday warned drought was “set to increase in severity and frequency.” “The consequences of droughts could affect up to three-quarters of humanity by 2050,” he said during a speech in Madrid. Experts warned the high temperatures were caused by worrying climate change trends. “As a result of climate change, heatwaves are starting earlier,” said Clare Nullis, a spokeswoman for the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva. “What we’re witnessing today is unfortunately a foretaste of the future” if concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise and push global warming toward 2 degrees C from pre-industrial levels, she added.

KYIV: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the war-damaged southern city of Mykolaiv on Saturday for the first time since the Russian invasion in a rare trip outside Kyiv. Zelensky’s office published a video of him looking at a badly damaged high-rise residential building in the city and holding a meeting with local officials. His visit comes a day after a Russian strike killed two people and injured 20 in the city. Mykolaiv has been targeted by Russian forces since the start of their invasion on February 24. In the video Zelensky was shown damage to a residential building by local governor Vitaliy Kim. The tall building had a gaping hole, with the inside of apartments visible. A blue and yellow Ukrainian trident was seen in one of the shattered windows. Zelensky also took part in a meeting with local officials in what looked like an underground basement, giving out awards for bravery. His office said they “discussed the state of the economy, the restoration of water supplies and the situation in agriculture.” “Special attention was paid to threats from land and sea. We do not stop working for victory,” the statement read. Mykolaiv has been holding the defense of southern Ukraine, as it lies on the way to the key strategic Black Sea port of Odessa. The city is around 100 kilometers (62 miles) northwest of Kherson, which fell to Russian forces in the first weeks of the war. The regional administrative building was hit by a Russian strike in March, tearing a hole through the center of the complex and killing more than a dozen people. Zelensky has been based in Kyiv since Moscow invaded, making his first trip outside the capital to the eastern city of Kharkiv in late May.

SYLHET: Monsoon rains in Bangladesh have killed at least 25 people and unleashed devastating floods that left more than four million others stranded, police told AFP Saturday. Lightning strikes during monsoon rains killed 21 people around the South Asian nation since Friday while four others died in landslides triggered by the storms, district police officers said.