16 B’deshi nationals held in five months with Indian passports obtained on fake docs

A Bangladeshi national was caught at Mumbai airport using a fraudulently obtained Indian passport, revealing an eight-year deception involving fake documents. This is the 16th case in the past five months of a Bangladeshi national being caught trying to fly abroad using an Indian passport obtained with fake credentials. The accused flyer, Mithun Chandra Roy, had a boarding pass for Nairobi, with connecting flights to Harare and Zambia. He has been booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Passport Act.

MUMBAI: A Bangladeshi national’s attempt to travel from Mumbai to Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, was foiled by immigration officials at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA), revealing an eight-year deception involving a fraudulently obtained Indian passport using fake documents like a birth certificate that showed him born in India.

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Sahar police said the immigration officials found out that the accused flyer, Mithun Chandra Roy, 34, had used fake documents to get an Indian passport. Roy is the 16th Bangladeshi national to be caught at the city’s international airport in the past five months while trying to fly abroad using an Indian passport obtained with fake credentials.

According to the Sahar police officers in the early hours of Tuesday the assistant Immigration Officer Rishabh Singh, who was on duty at the immigration counter, was approached by a flyer who presented his passport and visa along with other documents. When Singh noticed that Roy, who was from Delhi according to his documents, had visited Bangladesh twice and had stamped on his passport, he suspected some foul play and asked Roy the purpose of his visit. The flyer, however, did not give satisfactory replies. Singh then suspected that Roy was a Bangladeshi national.

Roy had a boarding pass for flying from Mumbai to Nairobi, then connecting flights from Nairobi to Harare and Harare to Zambia.

Singh took Roy to his superior, wing in-charge Mohammed Shahid, for questioning. On asking Roy, he said that since he was 11 years old, he was attached to the ISCON and was brought to India where he stayed in Bengaluru, Delhi and Noida in ISCON shelters. In 2015, he met an agent Ram Samus, a resident of Karol Baug who had offered to make his Aadhar card and PAN card using which he applied for an Indian passport.

Roy had travelled to Kenya in the past using the passport. “When the wing in-charge checked Roy’s phone, he found the passport copies of his parents from Dhaka in Bangladesh and referred him to us for legal action,” said a police officer from Sahar police station.

The Sahar police have booked Roy under sections 420 (cheating), 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating) of the Indian Penal Code and section 12 of the Passport Act.