Poreg View: By all means the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is not expected to come up with the finding that ‘false UK passports are made in Pakistan’. But it did so while digging deep into the way Pakistan is keyed up to check overseas travel by home grown and itinerant terrorist alike. The GPO field team examined four key areas -sharing of information on terrorists, use of fraudulent travel papers, passport issuance security and corruption in passport issuance and immigration agencies.
‘The findings pose a major challenge to American counter-terrorism efforts’, says the GPO report titled `Combating Terrorism’ and presented to the US Congress.
Finding One: ‘In Pakistan, both State and DHS were both planning to hold training on detecting fraudulent travel documents training for the same Pakistani agency during the same month without knowing of the other’s plans’
Finding Two: State and US AID have multiple efforts in helping countries improve the security of their passport issuance. In fact, State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs regularly takes delegations from foreign passport offices to the United States for briefings at passport-related agencies.
Finding Three: U.S. government lacks performance measures to assess government-wide progress in closing the key gaps in foreign partners’ capacity to prevent terrorist travel overseas.
Finding Four: “Fraudulent British passports are the most prevalent type of fraudulent travel documents in Pakistan”, according to …Since British citizens are not required to obtain visas to travel to many countries, a terrorist could use one of these fraudulent passports to travel to many countries without further background checks“, the report, titled `Combating Terrorism’ and presented to the US Congress last month, said.
While Findings One to Three should be cause for worry to the White House as it exposes the soft underbelly of the American administration, the reference to the fake UK passports will not give sleepless nights to the foreign office in Islamabad. In fact there is nothing new about this finding. For more than a decade Police in European countries have been periodically smashing gangs that make and sell British fake passports across Europe.
FAKE PRINCE CHARMINGS
Besides fake UK passports, Pakistan is also home for fake British Brides and Bride grooms, ‘who dress like the Brits, who style their like the Brit youth, and who talk like the Brits’. It is because of the craze for all things British and the hope that marriage is the sure way to a new world of hope where despair doesn’t exist. Only after landing in London, the web of deceit is exposed when it is too late, according to researchers who have uncovered the disturbing practice taking place under the open sky.
On 25 April 2008, for instance, the Telegraph, UK, reported from Paris that the police had seized more than 100 forged British passports along with stamps used for forging British birth certificates and tax documents. One of the ‘manufacturing units’ was based in a specially adapted van that moved around the Paris region.
The daily quoted the police as saying that the going price for these passports was between £2,000 and £4,000. Illegal immigrants from Pakistan bought these forged documents for entry into Britain, France, Belgium and Germany.
Around 20 people, mostly from Pakistan, were arrested in co-ordinated raids across the Paris suburbs. The arrested included the gang’s six ringleaders, the Telegraph reported.
From fake Prince Charming to fake Princes Charming, forged documents to terrorist travellers is logical progression. Though the trade is thriving as clearly brought out by American journalist, Nicholas Schmidle in his book on his two tumultuous years in Pakistan ( To Live or To Perish Forever, Random House India, 2009), the Thai police were the first to smash the racket last December in a 18-month long joint operation with the Spanish authorities, codenamed ‘Kampai’.
Thai police arrested two Pakistanis and a Thai woman on charge of making fake passports for international terrorist groups, The Strait Times reported on December 3, 2010.
OPERATION KAMPAI
They (the three) are suspected of being part of a transnational criminal group, linked with terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and involved with many terrorist attacks in Spain and European Union countries”, Thai police said and identified the Pakistanis as Muhammad Athar Butt (39) and Zeeshan Ehsan Butt (29). They face the prospect of up to 20 years in jail.
On their part, the Spanish police arrested six Pakistanis and a Nigerian in raids in and around Barcelona. The group’s modus operandi was to steal passports in Spain and send them to Thailand to be altered. The forged passports were then distributed to militants, allowing them easy entry to countries they had targeted.
Athar has been identified as the director of forging operations, as well as the head of cells in London and Brussels, which have unusually large concentration of immigrant Pakistanis. The two cities are also the primary focus of ISI to drum up support for Pakistan’s Kashmir plank using “Kashmir Centers,” as the front organisations, Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent, reported in the Telegraph, on July 19 of this year.
The European police authorities have tumbled upon the fake Kashmir spy route after two alleged spies were charged in the United States of failing to disclose their affiliation with the Pakistani government. One of the two is Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, 62, a US citizen from Fairfax, Virginia, who runs a Kashmiri American Cente. He was arrested and he confessed to have received ISI money. The second one is Zaheer Ahmad, 63, a US citizen who has been living in Pakistan, and is still untraceable.
On their part the Thai police suspect that the gang they had smashed could be related to the Mumbai terror attack in November 2008.
‘Post-Mumbai investigations revealed that people in Spain and Italy had made some payments via the hawala (informal currency exchange) system to pay for Voice over Internet Protocol services for the attackers’, said Special Branch police chief Tritos Ronritthiwichai.
But it is yet to be established that the fake documents used by the Mumbai attackers were made in Thailand.
-m. rama rao
