Islamic
State Said to Have ‘Industry of Fake Passports’
French
Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urges Europe to create task forces to help
identify bogus papers
By VALENTINA POP
Jan. 25, 2016 12:09
p.m. ET
AMSTERDAM—Islamic
State has created an industry from passports seized in Iraq, Syria
and Libya, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday.
At a meeting of
interior ministers in Amsterdam, Mr. Cazeneuve made the case for
setting up special task forces to be sent to Greece to assist the
identification of fake or stolen passports.
“Daesh has managed
to seize passports in Iraq, Syria and Libya and to set up a true
industry of fake passports,” Mr. Cazeneuve said in a news
conference after the meeting, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic
State.
He made the case for
establishing this task force and for authorities in the European
Union to upload any relevant information to the counterterrorism
databases in the bloc.
At least two of the
terrorists in the Paris attacks in November traveled on the migrant
route through Greece using Syrian passports and posing as refugees,
as over one million people arrived on the continent last year, mostly
via Greece.
Speaking in a
separate news conference, Greek deputy interior minister Nikos Toskas
admitted that identifying fake passports is a big challenge for Greek
authorities, particularly when thousands of people arrive every day
on a small island.
He said at the peak
of the migratory influx last year, when 10,000 people were arriving
daily on the Greek islands, only about half of the migrants were
registered. But fingerprinting has improved since, he said.
“We are checking
these people, as proved by the Paris perpetrators. When French
authorities asked us to check their identity, we found the data and
passed it on immediately,” Mr. Toskas said.
“But on the issue
of fake documents, many are sold on Middle East markets and we know
how difficult it is to identify them with good machines, in calm
conditions, not when you have 4,000 arriving in a day,” he said.
While no decision
has yet been taken on sending fake document specialists to Greece,
the head of the bloc’s police agency, Europol, said that his
experts are available to help governments on this issue.
“Europol is
helping member states in this unprecedented migration crisis, in
particular in regards to organized crime, where the provision of fake
documents is a key part of criminal activity,” Europol chief Rob
Wainwright said.
Mr. Wainwright added
that since the terrorist attacks in Paris on Nov. 13, there has been
a “considerable improvement in the level of intelligence exchanged,
also flowing through Europol.”
Write to Valentina
Pop at valentina.pop@wsj.com
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