A 32-year-old man from Gujarat was detained in Mumbai for allegedly using a fake passport to travel to three countries in the previous five years. Mujib Hussain Kazi, a native of Gujarat’s Kheda district, has been named as the accused. Kazi informed the authorities that he had entered the UK in 2010 on a student visa and had been living and working there illegally for a significant amount of time after the visa had expired.
“In 2018, he managed to go to Portugal, where he obtained the passport through an agent. Using this passport, he obtained an Indian entry visa and visited the country at least thrice and has also gone to France. He came to Mumbai on Wednesday on a flight that left Paris and came via Doha,” said an officer with the Sahar police station.
At 1.45 pm on Wednesday, Kazi arrived at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, but immigration officers detained him because his passport was flagged.
Kazi submitted the immigration official with his Portuguese passport, which listed him as Sultan Fakir Mohammed. According to a police officer, the officer discovered that Kazi was the subject of a look-out notice after entering his passport number into the system.
According to the notice, the subject was a forger who had obtained the passport illegally in 2018 while posing as someone else.
When the police and immigration authorities checked his travel records, they found that he had made one trip to India each in 2019, 2020 and 2022 and gone back to London using the same passport.
“We will be sending official requests via diplomatic channels to the concerned authorities in Portugal, UK as well as France to find out more about how he managed to fly under the radar for five years. The process will be initiated under provisions of Mutual Legal Agreement Treaties and will be executed through the Central Bureau of Investigation. We are in touch with the Portuguese authorities,” the officer said.
Kazi has been booked for cheating, forgery and dishonest use of a forged document as genuine under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code, as well as for furnishing false information to obtain a passport, under the Passport Act, 1937.