U.K. Home Office issues 10,000 passports to fraudsters

The numbers are staggering: The Guardian’s James Sturcke reports that an estimated 10,000 British passports were issued after fraudulent applications during a twelve-month period. What is more, the U.K. Home Office admitted that al-Qaida terrorists have successfully faked applications. The Home Office minister, Joan Ryan, said the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) had received 16,500 fraudulent applications between October 2005 and September 2006. She said that “almost half” the applications were stopped by existing safeguards, but the remainder had gone undetected. “Our current estimate is, therefore, that the level of undetected fraud is about 0.5%, equivalent to 10,000 applications against the planned 6.6m passports issued per year,” Ryan said.

She offered the example of Dhiren Barot, the most senior al-Qaida terrorist ever captured in Britain, who received two passports. Barot — a British citizen who was jailed for life last November — was one of two convicted terrorists to be issued a passport. Moroccan national Salaheddine Benyaich, who is now serving eighteen years in Morocco for terrorist offences, also obtained two British passports in the name of a British citizen born in Brighton.

In part to counter to growing problem of fraudulent applications, first-time U.K. applicatns, as of May, would have to attend face-to-face interviews. The Home Office said that applicants would be expected to know answers from a pool of around 200 questions about their ancestry, financial history and previous addresses. Among other things, applicants will be asked who lives with them, whether they have a mortgage, where and when their parents were born, and which bank accounts they hold, and will also face questions about the counter-signatory to their passport application.