Immigration unearths major boarding card swap scam to send Lankan men to UK for asylum

Colombo, June 30 (Daily Mirror) - In a rare detection, the Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) officials at the airport yesterday arrested a Mullaitivu resident bound for Mumbai and uncovered a sophisticated scam of exchanging their boarding passes to go to the UK and allegedly to claim asylum afterwards.

The DIE officials who monitored the suspicious movements of a local passenger who was to board SriLankan Airlines flight UL 143 to Mumbai at 5.31 pm had taken him for questioning.

The 29-year-old male passenger, a resident of Mullaitivu, had claimed that he was bound for Mumbai with his genuine Sri Lankan passport. But the officials checked his baggage to find two French passports and two Spanish passports carefully concealed inside a puzzle box. They were all fake travel documents.

A senior immigration official told the Daily Mirror the department’s Border Surveillance Unit (BSU) checked the forged documents and found one of the two French passports contained the suspect’s photograph with a different name.

The officials then checked the name in the fake passport to learn that the person who actually bore that name had departed to Mumbai yesterday morning on Air India flight AI 273 with his spouse, with their UK passports as recorded in the system. They were identified to be locals from Jaffna who had obtained their UK citizenship earlier.

The officials then noted that another person with a name that is similar to the one in the female spouse’s name, who departed Katunayake yesterday morning, had left Sri Lanka for Mumbai on June 11 with a local passport.

Preliminary investigations revealed that the arrested suspect, who was to leave for India last evening, along with those who have already left, including the couple,were to meet in the Mumbai transit and exchange their boarding cards to take two different flights to London and Singapore.

The arrested suspect had obtained a double boarding card from Colombo to Mumbai and Mumbai to Singapore.

The suspect had claimed that he had paid Rs.9 million to an agent to get the passports done.

The DIE officials suspect that the two males who were to board a flight to the UK would destroy their Sri Lankan and fake French passports on the flight before claiming asylum at London Heathrow.

BSU officials under the instructions of senior officials at the department’s Investigation Division.

The arrested person was to be handed over to the CID.