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

By Kurulu Koojana Kariyakarawana   
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.