An Afghan woman was detained by Turkish authorities after attempting to enter Europe using the passport of a well-known pro-migration activist. She claimed her passport was stolen during a trip to Iran.
The incident took place in January of this year but details had not been made public until this week. They show that Turkish authorities detained an Afghan woman who was in possession of both the passport and Swedish residency documents of well-known pro-migration activist Fatemeh Khavari.
According to an investigation by the Swedish online journal Kvartal, the woman was stopped by Turkish officials while attempting to board a flight from Istanbul to Barcelona.
Fatemeh Khavari, an Afghan national who has led protests in Sweden to stop the deportation of Afghan migrants, told the journal that her Afghan passport had been stolen along with her handbag on a trip to Iran from December of last year to January.
She said she contacted Swedish police after the alleged robbery and the Swedes, in turn, contacted Iranian authorities who returned her documents to her in eight or nine days, claiming they had been sold to the woman in Istanbul by a human-trafficker.
Khavari said she was surprised that the Turkish authorities knew to send the Afghan passport and residency documents to Iran. “I actually don’t know how it works. I have no idea. When the Iranian police told me that they had my ID documents, I was very, very surprised myself,” she said.
According to the activist, Iranian police did not give her any documentation in connection with the incident, but she claimed to have emailed the Swedish embassy in Tehran.
When asked for copies of the emails, she refused to produce them.
A police source spoke to Kvartal and proposed that it was unlikely Turkish authorities could have known to send the documents to Iran and certainly not in eight or nine days.
Instead, the source proposed the pro-migration activist may have sold or loaned her documents to the woman and the Turkish officials did not seize the documents at all, noting the passport and residency card had not been blocked.
The claims come after former Social Democrat politician Rashad Alasaad, a migrant from Syria, was arrested in January for helping to smuggle migrants into Sweden. Alasaad is said to have charged 3,000 euros for adults and 2,000 euros for children to get them passport documents to enter the country.