Passport racket unearthed
Posted by africanpress on May 21, 2008
Publisher: Korir, africanpress@getmail.no source.standard.ke
By David Ohito
An immigration, human trafficking and travel documents’ forgery syndicate has been unearthed in Nairobi.
The Immigration Department and the police are piecing together evidence and details of trafficking in suspected terrorists.
Two suspects are in police custody and more than 100 passports of different countries — 87 Somali, 12 Kenyan, 17 from the US, UK, France, Italy and a host of other European countries — were seized from a suspect in what has been described as a multi-million shilling international ring.
| Mr Dume Wanda, a senior Immigration officer in charge of prosecutions, displays some of the air tickets and passports netted from a “publisher” in Eastliegh. |
The Immigration Department raised the red flag over rising cases of forged documents and human trafficking. It deals with about seven cases daily and at times up to 200 incidents.
So grave is the problem that genuine travellers from Kenya could have problems travelling to the US, United Kingdom, the European Union and other countries with strict immigration rules.
It appears that chartered flights are used to move illegal immigrants to safe escape routes from where they cross borders on foot and in vehicles.
Clients pay between Sh200,000 and Sh500,000 for visas to South America and Europe in search of jobs and a better life.
Documents recovered included asylum application forms for US, South Africa and other European countries. South Africa’s, Kenya, Uganda, Somali and Ethiopia are the most easily forged passports.
The appeal for human trafficking is the lure of well paying jobs and relocation packages offered to unsuspecting clients.
In the syndicate, Kenyan passports are stolen and the bio-data and photo pages forged, thus making it difficult to ascertain authenticity.
Immigration officials on Tuesday appealed to the public to notify them of loss of passports and other security documents to help curb the crime.
Drug traffickers and international criminals use the forged documents to hide their identities.
The officials deplored the weakness of the law in combating human trafficking.
Details have emerged showing that Kenya was the preferred human trafficking centre in the continent because it had better infrastructure, facilities for local and international cash transfers, international air destination connections and a good road network with neighbourng countries.
Immigration officials said porous borders and an 800-km coastline without guards abetted trafficking in the region.
A key suspect who has been on the Immigration’s ‘most wanted’ list for nearly a year is still at large after two of his workers were nabbed.
The syndicate has been operating in Eastleigh, Nairobi, where forgery of visas, passports, birth and marriage certificates, travellers’ cheques, bank credit cards and air tickets is done.
Immigration officials are also investigating if the criminal outlet is linked to the illegal buying and selling of passports.
A senior Immigration officer, Mr Dume Wanda, said officials had confiscated forged and genuine travel documents.
Linked to the forgery saga is an outlet distributing airtime in Eastleigh where large amounts of money are transacted and banked to hide the illegal activities.
“This is a major breakthrough for our department because this is a dangerous syndicate that many Kenyans and foreigners have fallen prey to,” Wanda said.
Among the equipment recovered from the cartel included an ultra-violet light, a sophisticated instrument used to verify the authenticity of visas, passports, currency and travel documents. Several forged blank visas of the Schengen States were part of the items Immigration investigators were holding.
The gang operates from a hotel building, which disguises itself as a travel agency. Yesterday, detectives were investigating whether the travel agency was a registered business.
Similarly, the Immigration Department wrote to the Registrar of Persons to verify if identity cards and passports recovered from the two suspects were genuine or forgeries.
Application forms for Kenyan and Ugandan visas, vaccination and marriage certificates and stamped travel documents were also confiscated in the Friday operation.
So sophisticated is the cartel that they forge letters for international seminars and workshops which are used to get visas from unsuspecting embassies. Three prominent travel agencies are used as conduits. Stolen credit cards are used to buy airline tickets for clients involved in the fraud. Investigators are zeroing in on the premises where printing of visas is done.
Charges for forged documents range between Sh40,000 and Sh100,000. But in some cases, securing a passport complete with a visa before photographs are superimposed costs up to Sh500,000.
In others, genuine passports are stolen from the public and travellers before they are handed over to ‘look-alike’ people.
The trafficking ring offers fine details how to evade the police and Immigration spots. Clients are advised to travel by road or through porous borders to avoid detection.
“We are unearthing many illegal activities, including women being paid to have ‘miracle babies’ who need passports. We arrest them when they forget and present applications for passports where three children were born of the same mother in a year yet they are not triplets,” Wanda said.
This is the second major immigration and identity fraud in recent times. Recently, a Congolese, identified as Mr Emmanuel Lambata, was deported after he forged travel documents that would have aided 34 countrymen to be flown to Hungary.
He was arrested with 12 Kenyan passports as he presented them to the Czech embassy.
“Foreign missions have been of great help in the efforts to curb visa and passport forgery,” Wanda said.
Last week, 18 Indians trafficked to Kenya were arrested.
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African Press International – api
