The National Police have arrested five men of Iranian nationality at border control at the Tenerife South airport, who were trying to fly to the UK and Ireland using fake passports.
The first of the detainees was intercepted at the boarding gate for a flight to Dublin. When the passport scanning machine didn’t recognize the man’s passport, agents went to see what was happening, and confirmed that he was trying to use a fake Israeli passport without the correct security measures and elements on it.
The second detainee was supposed to be travelling with the first, but he tried to escape when his passport wouldn’t work. The police located him at the airport and he appeared nervous when they approached him, and after identifying him, verified that he also had a fake Israeli passport.
Further checks were carried out at the National Police headquarters, and the two men were confirmed to be undocumented Iranian citizens from France who wanted to fly to Ireland using false passports.
Three others stopped trying to fly to the UK:
A few days after these arrests, three other people, also of Iranian nationality, were detained at the Tenerife South airport trying to board a flight to Manchester.
The first of them tried to use a French passport which wouldn’t scan correctly, and border control staff were surprised that he didn’t speak French when they questioned him, so he was detained for further investigation.
With him was a fourth man who was trying to go through passport control with using documents from Austria, which obviously turned out to be false as the photograph on the passport plainly wasn’t him, so he was also arrested.
Finally, seeing these two stopped, another passenger decided to get out of line raising the suspicions of the agents, who approached him and intercepted him. This man stated that he did not have a passport, although a French document without the identification page ripped out of it was later found in the immediate vicinity.
All five were handed over to the competent judicial authority to be sentenced and deported accordingly.
Payment for false documentation to a criminal organization:
Allegedly, each of these five people paid up to 20,000 euros for the new documentation and plane tickets to the same person, who belongs to a criminal organization that specializes in human trafficking, that has operated in other parts of Spain.
These documents are not only to get them to the UK and Ireland but are their new identities so that they can get social support when they get there and start new lives.
