Thursday, August 13, 2009

"Five cases of passport fraud a week in Nairobi"

In another post about the Mohamud case, Dr. Dawg provides original information which explains the story behind the story about why Canadian consular officials in Kenya were so convinced that Suaad was scamming them.
Dawg describes a memo he received from the assistant of NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar explaining what the NDP was told about had happened at the end of May at the Nairobi airport:
There's not a mention of Mohamud on the NDP website. I am aware that my own MP and friend, NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, who did yeoman work on the Abdelrazik affair, raised the Mohamud matter with DFAIT. Judging from correspondence I received, however, it seems that Foreign Affairs was able to snow the NDP enough to dampen any enthusiasm it might have had to pursue things further. This was what Paul's assistant wrote to me (and told me was not confidential):
Ms. Mohamud was initially stopped by Kenyan officials because her photos did not match. When Ms. Mohamud originally arrive at the airport a photo was taken of her by Kenyan immigration officials and when she arrived at the airport to depart the person who presented Ms. Mohamud passport did not match either the passport photo or the airports entry photo. That’s when CBSA was contacted to investigate. Foreign Affairs and CSBA have conducted four separate investigations and she has failed each one including the visual photo matching tests, extensive interviews, etc. Fingerprints were requested by Foreign Affairs in the hopes that they might match sets in Canada but to date there are no prints on record with CIC or any other agency or police department. Consular services are not being provided to the woman who presented herself as Ms. Mohamud because she is not a Canadian citizen.
I was also informed by DFAIT that CBSA deals with on average 5 cases of passport fraud a week in Nairobi and they have a well developed manner of investigating these types of cases. I have put in a similar request for information from CBSA to make sure their story matches the one I received from DFAIT.
So I think this story explains why official Ottawa -- Conservative, NDP and Liberal -- have not been supporting the Suaad Mohamed case. I hadn't heard anything before about the number of cases of passport fraud Canada is seeing in Nairobi, nor about the photo taken of Suaad when she arrived in Kenya in early May. If this story is true, no wonder Canadian officials would have thought it wasn't really her at the airport in May.
But there are two things I don't understand:
First, in all these cases of passport fraud, how is the person whose passport has been used by someone else ever going to get back into the country -- was the next step for the real Suaad do pop up at the Commission to claim her passport had been stolen overseas?
And now, after the supposedly fake Suaad was stopped at the airport and interviewed and arrested, but then had all this other ID, and was DNA-tested, and it was proven that she actually was and is the real Suaad, why can't anyone admit that a mistake was made?

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