Tamil Nadu intelligence, central agencies probe fake passport racket

Chennai: After the arrest of a Bangladeshi national at Thiruvananthapuram airport in Kerala on August 13 with a fake passport for travelling to Sri Lanka, the central agencies have upped their ante and have alerted the Tamil Nadu state intelligence for an increased surveillance of the fake passport racket.

The arrested Bangladeshi national said that he was to travel to Sri Lanka on the fake passport enroute his future journey to Europe where he wanted to settle. However, sources in the police told IANS that there were several missing dots to his claims.

It is to be noted that Chennai and Madurai are two major towns of South India from where several earlier instances of fake racket cases were detected.

Sources in Tamil Nadu Police told IANS that there is a major group of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in the state and many of them are trying to procure fake passports to travel to European destinations. There are certain agents who are supporting the travel of these people.

According to a senior officer, the now defunct LTTE is also on a revival path and there are networks that support them to gain illegal and fake passports. The fake passport rackets even after regular arrests and cracking down are mushrooming due to the requirements from several organized gangs.

In May 2022, a three-member gang was arrested by the Chennai city police for preparing fake passports. The arrested were identified as Mohammed Illiaz Sheik, Mohammed Bukhari and their assistant, Sivakumar. The arrested used to buy expired passports from people across the country and then remove the pages that had visa stamping and replace them with loose sheets.

Police had then stated that it was Illyas who was the kingpin of the racket and had been jailed twice earlier for fake passport cases. Tamil Nadu Police will be questioning Illyas, the kingpin of the racket, to find out whether he was involved in the recent fake passport cases.

A few months before, a Bangladeshi national was arrested with a fake passport at the Coimbatore airport and he had also then told the immigration officials that he got the fake passport from Chennai.

While LTTE is now defunct, there is an active movement globally to revive it for a separate Tamil land based out of Sri Lanka and sources in agencies revealed to IANS that Tamil Nadu has been one of the hotspots for several discussions in this regard. Senior intelligence operative of LTTE, Santukam alias Sabesan was arrested from Chennai in October 2021 after being involved in a Rs 3,000 crore drug smuggling racket.