Swedish Migration Board Finds Nearly One in Ten Turkish Passports Are Forgeries

The Swedish Migration Board has sounded an alarm over the high number of fake Turkish passports being found at border checks, saying some of the passports show advanced forging knowledge.

Since the Autumn of 2018, Swedish border officials have sent around 400 Turkish passports for extra checks and have found that nearly ten per cent of those examined were forgeries, Swedish broadcaster SVT reports.

Magnus Bengtsson, who works on asylum cases at the Migration Board, said that the forgeries were not only numerous but that some of them showed an advanced level of forgery saying, “It is not just anyone who can do this kind of good quality. It requires very good equipment and access to technology to succeed this well.”

The Migration Board has also seen reports from other European countries over fake Turkish passports and from the U.S. mission to Turkey and says that it has reported the fakes to police and has started a policy to check all Turkish passports for those seeking residency in Sweden to ensure their validity.

Bengtsson said that he was not sure how long the added scrutiny toward Turkish passports would last.

Turkey is also the nation to have taken in the highest number of Syrian asylum seekers, with an estimated 3,545,293 Syrians being granted temporary protection status.

Fake passports have been a major problem for several European countries since the height of the migrant crisis in 2015 including in Sweden.  A damning report from the European Union released last year claimed that Swedish border guards had such a lack of training that many were unable to spot forged documents and claimed Sweden had the worst border control in the European Union.

Forged passports have also been seen in Germany where a report from Europol and the European Union border agency Frontex claimed that the number of migrants flying into Germany from Greece and other EU countries with fake documents had increased by 70 per cent in the latter half of 2017.

Despite it being illegal to forge official documents and to carry them, Germany let in migrants during the migrant crisis knowing that their documents were fake and allowed them to apply for asylum.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson(at)breitbart.com