FAKE PASSPORTS SUSPECTED TO BE ISSUED BY THE LTTE SPRING UP AT DIFFERENT PLACES IN THE WORLD

By Walter Jayawardhana

Three Sri Lankans who were thought to be getting ready to travel with fake Australian passports supplied by a racket organized allegedly by the Liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were arrested by the Immigration office in Pattaya, in Thailand.

The tip that these three Sri lankans were getting ready to travel to New Zealand with the fake Australian passports was given to Police Colonel Itipon , the Chief of Pattaya’s office by the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, the Pattaya City News , revealed.

The information received from the embassy said, according to Pattaya News , the passports were part of a major racket , and the Sri lankans were to possess them, were living in Pattaya with the intention of moving to Phuket where they were waiting to be obtained by them

Earlier investigations show LTTE has entered into the production of fake passports and stolen blank passports from various government offices in different capitals of the world and sell them to people willing to travel mostly to obtain jobs as a major income for the insurgent group mainly for the procurement of arms.

In Sri Lanka, working with some travel agents, Sri Lankans searching for foreign jobs are sent , by agents of the LTTE, to Bangkok as a transit point and from there to various destinations in industrialized countries. Large sums are being charged for this service.

Pattaya News said, “There was also a suspicion that each man had entered Thailand illegally and did not have visas in their existing passports. The group was expected to travel to New Zealand where they would be able to find work with their fake passports. Immigration Officers tracked the three men to the Thompson House Apartments in Soi Beokeow where the three were arrested and found to be carrying passports with no visa stamps.”

The newspaper further said, Mr. Somaratane Kanishka Manoj aged 33, Mr. Arumugam Navaratnom aged 30 and Mr. Nadarajan Prasat aged 26 were taken to the Immigration Office in Soi 5 Jomtien Beach Road and will now be prosecuted in accordance with Thai law. Further investigations into others involved in the fake passport operation is still ongoing, the report added.

Meanwhile two passengers who managed to board an Air France flight from the Chennai Airport in Tamil Nadu and reached Paris during the previous week were found to be with two fake passports.
Reporting on the incident the Hindu newspaper of March 28 said, “Preliminary investigation revealed they were in possession of different passports and used these for booking tickets and completing the check-in formalities. Officials had traced the travel agent through whom the tickets were booked.
“A senior Immigration officer said both the passengers had destroyed their passports and other documents during transit. This clearly indicated they had used fake documents to book the tickets as well as to check-in”

Investigations in the United States have revealed that the LTTE agents who supply the fake passports to paid clients instructs them to tear the passports and dump them in airplane toilets and request them to apply for asylum when they reach ports of entry. From there the clients are taken to a refugee camp and there LTTE hired Tamil lawyers come and take over their immigration cases as asylum seekers.