20,000 copies missing in Jeddah, Dubai
Sinister Passport Scandal Rocks Islamabad
By
Rauf Klasra
ISLAMABAD:
A mammoth scandal has been innocently unearthed by unsuspecting
auditors involving close to 20,000 missing Pakistani and Burmese
passports sent to Pak embassies in Saudi Arabia and Dubai.
Given
the intricate situation of international terrorism and the visible
Saudi involvement, the 
disappearance
of these passports assumes a far more sinister dimension than originally
thought by Pakistani auditors who unearthed the scam in a special
audit inspection of Pakistani missions abroad, including Dubai,
Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Madrid and Paris
for the years 1997-98 to 2000-2001. The inspections were done between
January 19 to March 25, 2002 and a report was presented to President
Musharraf in May, 2002.
According
to documents now being released by SA Tribune, auditors found, as
late as February 2002, that over 6,000 Emergency Pakistani Passport
books were unaccounted for in Pakistan Embassy in Jeddah and over
7,500 were missing in Dubai. Since the audit was concerned with
only the financial implication of this scam, it called for investigations
to recoup the financial shortages caused by the disappearance only.
View Official Report Page1 | Page2
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The
reports also reveal that 3,900 Burmese Passports sent to Pakistan
Embassy in Jeddah, probably because Pakistan may have been looking
after the Burmese diplomatic interests, were also missing.
But
the political and anti-terrorism implications of a persisting pattern
of missing passports were ignored by all, including the Pakistani
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, former ISI Chief Lt. General (Retd)
Asad Durrani, who partly presided over the mysterious disappearance
of these books.
Officials said the inspection reports were discussed
with the heads of Missions before their issuance. The reports were
first issued to the mission concerned with copies to the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Interior between March 11 and
April 26, 2002 inviting their para-wise replies.
Not
surprisingly, no response whatsoever was received from any quarter
till the end of May 2002 when the report was submitted to the President
of Pakistan in terms of article 171 of the Constitution. Manzoor
Hussain, Auditor General of Pakistan, who submitted the report,
retired in August and was replaced by Younis Khan.
“No
one knows who benefited and who used or misused these Pakistani
passports, if at all,” an interior ministry official told
the SA Tribune. "A detailed probe is definitely in order."
In
an accompanying scandal, which would definitely be linked to the
missing passports, auditors also found 3,500 Pakistani “Endorsement
Stickers” unaccounted for in the same embassy in Saudi Arabia.
View Report
This
would clearly point to a pattern of some Pakistani officials deeply
involved in the business of providing forged passports and endorsing
these passports with stickers, without bringing any of these on
the official records.
Luckily
one audit report mentions the serial number of these 6,000 passports
which had not been accounted for. These were sent to Jeddah by Immigration
Department in Karachi in 1997 and 1998. These Nos are: SS 022000
to SS 023000, SS 058501 to SS 060500 and SS 060501 to SS 063500,
sent between August 1997 to July 1998.
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