Nepali Woman Held at Mumbai Airport for Using Forged Indian Passport; Syndicate Suspected
Mumbai airport exposes audacious passport fraud ring.
Immigration officials at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai arrested a Nepali national last week after she brazenly attempted to board an Oman-bound flight using a fraudulently obtained Indian passport, revealing a sophisticated operation that successfully breached multiple layers of India’s identity verification system.
The woman confidently approached the immigration counter identifying herself as Kajal, a citizen born in Nohra village of Himachal Pradesh, and presented an Indian passport issued from the Shimla Regional Passport Office along with supporting documents; however, her distinctly Nepali facial features and slight inconsistencies in demeanour immediately alerted seasoned officers, prompting an immediate referral for exhaustive secondary examination.
Under sustained and detailed questioning in a secured verification area, the suspect’s composure collapsed; she confessed her real name to be Kajal Lama, a resident of Parsa district in southern Nepal, and admitted that neither she nor her family had ever legally resided in India, thereby exposing the entire Indian identity she presented as a meticulously constructed fabrication.
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Investigators discovered that she had exploited a fabricated narrative of childhood migration from Nepal to Himachal Pradesh to first obtain foundational documents—an Aadhaar card, PAN card, voter ID, and a bona fide residence certificate—all linked to a non-existent address in Himachal; armed with these forged papers, she had successfully convinced the Shimla Passport Office to issue her a genuine Indian passport, highlighting critical vulnerabilities in the cross-verification chain between state-level documentation and central passport issuance.
Sahar police have now registered a comprehensive case against Kajal Lama under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for cheating by personation, forging valuable security, using forged documents as genuine, and criminal conspiracy, alongside serious violations of the Passports Act; authorities are intensifying the probe to dismantle any larger syndicate that may be systematically enabling foreign nationals to acquire legitimate Indian travel documents for illegal international movement.
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