POLICE at Larnaca Airport’s passport control are seldom shocked by the lengths some people will go to in order to pass themselves off as someone else.
But even they were taken by surprise last week when a Pakistani man dyed his hair blonde and powdered his face in an attempt to pass off as his Bulgarian friend whose ID card he had stolen.
The 30-year-old man had been trying to go to Rome when his disguise was uncovered. He was promptly arrested, charged with forgery and false impersonation and remanded in custody.
According to Larnaca police spokesman Christos Andreou, ever since Cyprus became a member of the European Union, Larnaca CID has been laden with cases involving immigrants trying to get through passport control with fake documents.
“Due to the buffer zone, many immigrants – mainly Turks, Sri Lankans, Syrians or Moldavians – arrive at the illegal airport of Tympou in the occupied areas through Turkey, with the aim of crossing over to the free areas and travelling to the EU through Larnaca Airport,” Andreou explained. “They usually present fake passports from EU states, such as Romania or England or others.”
Andreou said there were three main methods immigrants use in order to fool the authorities. “They either buy completely fake documents, most probably in Turkey. Or they use real documents but change the photo using a small sharp knife. Or they present passports with photos of people that look like them or – such as in the most recent case with the man from Pakistan – they use real stolen documents and try to look like the person’s photo.”
Another method commonly used, he added, was attaining a passport from someone in England who has British citizenship but is of Asian descent. “They get their friends to send them their passports and try and fool the authorities that it is them.”
It is a method that has been used quite effectively over the years with Filipina domestic workers, for example, who, once their five year-stint on the island is up, go back to the Philippines, and then return to Cyprus on a relative’s passport. But the officers who work at passport control are specially trained to deal with such cases, and have become experienced in spotting when something isn’t quite right.
“They can immediately detect a fake document or whether a person is not the same as the one in the photo,” said Andreou. “They don’t only look at the photo. If, say someone is travelling to France on a French passport, the policeman has a number of tricks to use if he is unsure. For example if he speaks to the person in French and the person doesn’t understand, they know something isn’t right.”
The immigrants’ main aim is to travel to other EU states. “In some cases, they really look like the photo, but in some cases it is just so blatantly obvious,” said Andreou. “In one incident, the man had much bigger ears than the man in the photo. But the Pakistani man was the first time we have ever faced a situation to that extent. He used powder to lighten his skin and dyed his hair blonde. The officers at passport control figured him out straight away.”
From September 2008 until today, the police have dealt with 49 such cases. The people were arrested, remanded and tried in court. The majority of those were illegal immigrants, though some were in Cyprus with political asylum.
