Pakistan deports 500 Afghan refugees before registration deadline expires

An Afghan refugee family walks past trucks loaded with their belongings as they prepare to go back to Afghanistan with others, at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office on the outskirts of Peshawar February 13, 2015. PAKISTAN-AFGHANISTAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan has extended by six months a deadline for Afghan refugees to register with the government, a refugee official said on Wednesday, a day before the deadline was set to expire.

Pakistan has the world's second largest refugee population, with more than 1.5 million registered, and about a million unregistered, refugees from Afghanistan, most of whom fled the Soviet occupation of their country in the 1980s.