Rasheed Akhtar Niazi is a well-travelled man, as the numerous stamps on his Pakistanti passport testify. An entrepreneur from Islamabad, he does business with companies in Germany, Britain, Turkey and the Netherlands, and speaks fluent German and English.

In the pages of his heavily thumbed passport is a small, black oval-shaped stamp from the Immigration Office at Dublin Airport which indicates that he was refused leave to enter the State on November 24th, 2000.

Following this refusal, Mr Niazi and his six colleagues spent an uncomfortable long weekend in the Training Unit beside Mountjoy prison in Dublin.

They were freed by the High Court on Monday after the State agreed to their release, but not before they had spent another unpleasant few hours in a cold holding cell in the Bridewell Garda Station while their case was adjourned.

The stamps on the men's passports indicating they were refused "leave to land" have since been cancelled, but they remain worried that the passport saga could mark them out as suspicious on any future business trips.

"I hope it will not make any difference, because the other countries they are interested only if someone is having their visa or not," said Mr Niazi. "If they have objections in the future, I'll ask them to check it with the Irish authorities."

When they touched down in Dublin airport at about 11.30 a.m. last Friday week, Mr Niazi and his colleagues were planning a very different weekend from the one they experienced. They were going to find a hotel in Dublin and relax before the Muslim festival of Ramadan started. The following Monday, they were to meet their Northern business colleagues to visit several plants in the Republic to inspect equipment.

Mr Niazi, the managing director of his own business-and trade-consultants company and a member of the Chamber of Commerce in Islamabad, was the leader of the delegation.

He is the sole agent in Pakistan for a Co Tyrone company, Finlay Ltd, which produces block-making equipment. He gets 20 per cent commission for importing this expensive machinery into Pakistan, and the purpose of the trip to Ireland was to see the equipment in operation.

When they presented their visas at the airport, the men also showed a letter from the firm confirming the purpose of their trip and one from the Consulate of Ireland in Karachi confirming the validity of their three-month business visas issued by the Irish Embassy in Tehran.

The High Court heard on Monday that immigration officials suspected the men intended to enter the UK jurisdiction illegally after they gave Finlay Ltd as a contact address on their landing cards. Some of them also had open return flight tickets.

Mr Niazi says he told officials they would be staying in the Republic and had no intention of travelling to the North. In fact, Mr Niazi and another colleague have valid UK visitors' visas, but they, along with the rest of the men, were still detained and had their passports, visas, flight tickets and money seized.

They would have been flown out of the State on Sunday, had they not contacted a solicitor from jail, who began High Court proceedings.

"It was unimaginable that something like this could happen to us," says Mr Niazi, who says he "lost his senses" when they were imprisoned. "I have travelled a lot in Europe and this is the first time something like this has happened. If the immigration officer was of the view that we used Dublin as a gateway to Northern Ireland, all he had to do was to ring the company to check."

Solicitor David Christie was catching up on some work in his Parnell Street office on Saturday when he received a phone call from Mr Niazi. Mr Christie normally does commercial, conveyancing and litigation and his first thought was to pass the men on to another solicitor.

"It was the despair in the man's voice that made me change my mind," he says. "I think he was nearly in tears and I felt obliged to them." Mr Christie says the men were hysterical when he called to see them in prison.

He is critical of the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue, for adding insult to injury against his clients in the Dail this week when he said groups from Pakistan and China who falsely represented themselves as businessmen had tried to enter the State in the past fortnight. Mr Christie says his clients have told him they have not received an apology from the State for the incident.

"I have no idea why these men were stopped," he says. "If they were from Egypt, they probably wouldn't have been stopped because the Government wants them to take our beef."

Mr Christie returned to court later last week to complain about the State's handling of the men's visas following their release. The State did not concede in the original court hearing that the decision to detain the men was made wrongfully, and has not agreed to pay their legal costs.

Mr Niazi is philosophical about the incident and says he just wants to get on with his business of importing goods into Pakistan. "It's just a laughing situation," he says with a shrug. "But OK, the immigration officer has a legal right to deny someone entry but before denying somebody it's a human right to ask if someone is having documents to prove and check if they are bona fide or not.

"If you come with me down the street you will see many, many people who are here illegally. We could have proved we were not illegal. We are not asylum-seekers either."

Before visiting Ireland, Mr Niazi's knowledge of the country came from travel books. He had heard of Bloody Sunday, the Belfast Agreement and the booming economy in the South. He says he has generally found Irish people to be very friendly, including the jail staff. The men are due to leave Ireland this weekend. Asked what lasting effect the ordeal will have on him, Mr Niazi replies: "It's like a piece of paper. I roll it up and throw it in the bin."