BUREAU of Immigration (BI) officers have arrested a Malaysian with a fake Philippine passport at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA).
In a report to Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente, BI port operations chief Grifton Medina identified the bogus Filipino as 36-year-old Toong Yuen Chin who was apprehended at the NAIA last January 11 attempting to leave the country via an Air Asia flight to Kuala Lumpur.
Medina said Chin used a counterfeit Philippine passport under the assumed name of Jacky Cruz Chin.
The immigration officer became suspicious when the alien declared that the passport could not be encoded by the passport reader.
“During secondary inspection, he confessed his true nationality as a Malaysian and admitted that a fixer named Lawrence facilitated his acquisition of a fraudulent Philippine passport for a fee,” Medina said.
The BI official said the Malaysian will be detained in compliance with Commissioner Morente’s directive that all alien travelers caught using spurious documents be prosecuted for violating our immigration laws.
The passenger is now confined at the BI Detention Center in Camp Bagong Diwa, Taguig City.
Senior immigration officer Glen Comia, who heads the BI travel control and enforcement unit at NAIA 3, said their records showed that Chin last arrived in the country on July 12 last year using his Malaysian passport.
“Apparently, he used the fake Philippine passport to evade payment of immigration fees and fines for overstaying in the country,” Comia said.
The Malaysian carried a Philhealth ID and a municipal birth certificate purportedly showing he was born in Sta. Ana, Manila to Filipino parents.
However, anti-fraud examiners found that the biographical page of the passenger’s Philippine passport is counterfeit, which explains why it could not be read by passport scanner. (Jun Ramirez)
