A sinister quarter within the department of immigration and passports was allegedly involved in the incident in which several thousand passports went missing from the
Agargaon passport office in the capital, DIP officials said.
They said the syndicate also let many people use old unscratched passports alongside the newly issued machine readable passports, causing problems at immigration
points.
Such anomalies were designed to foil the ongoing machine readable passports and visa project, informed sources said.
Sher-e-Bangla Nagar police station officer-in-charge, Zakir Hossain Mollah, however, told New Age on Thursday that a general diary was filed on July 23 where the
authorities mentioned some 2,280 passports went missing from the nearby Agargaon passport office.
The DIP, meanwhile, launched an investigation led by lieutenant colonel Md Abu Nasir Bhuiyan, a deputy director, to identify the people behind the crime and to
determine the exact number of passports that went missing from the Agarogaon passport office.
‘Everyone involved in passport issuance are under watch until the probe is completed and the criminals who threatened national security are identified,’ said Brigadier
General Md Refayet Ullah, the director for machine readable passport and visa project.
Different security agencies including National Security Intelligence were separately investigating the incident of missing passport booklets from DIP at Agargaon.
The home ministry in a meeting on July 23, however, asked the officials concerned to identify the elements involved in stealing passport books.
The DIP officials suspected some people who closely monitor the passport issuance might be involved in the incident.
Shiraj Uddin, director of DIP, also admitted that defence personnel had been deployed in the project only to provide technical assistance to the department while the
DIP officials were responsible to store, verify and issue passports.
‘DIP officials are the custodian of both the scrapped and valid passports,’ he told New Age.
Shiraj, however, could not confirm exactly from where and how the passport went missing.
Officials said that some 25, 000,00 MRPs have so far been issued.
-With New Age input
