BANGLADESHIS WITH FORGED VISAS DETAINED AT MAPUTO AIRPORT

The Mozambican immigration authorities on Tuesday night detained 63 Bangladeshi citizens at Maputo International Airport, whose entry visas turned out to be forged.The immigration desk at the airport is now armed with sophisticated electronic equipment which can detect forged passports and visas. The visas of all 63 Bangladeshis were scanned, and did not produce the image on the computer screen that would prove their validity.The head of the airport immigration services, Antonio Paulino, told the independent television station STV that the Bangladeshis had arrived on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa. The plane had carried around 200 passengers, most of them Asians.“During the immigration procedure, it was possible to discover that at least 63 of them were carrying forged visas”, he said. “We tried at once to put them back on the plane, but the airline did not want to cooperate, and the aircraft took off without. Right now they will be sent to the Maputo 18th police precinct, until they are repatriated on Thursday”.Apparently the Bangladeshis had traveled from Dhaka to Addis Ababa via Dubai. On arrival, they claimed to be seeking business opportunities, and protested that they did not know that their visas were forgeries. But they certainly did not look like investors or businessmen. The STV footage showed that they were mostly young men, many wearing jeans and T-shirts and carrying rucksacks. Most did not speak English, let alone Mozambique’s official language, Portuguese.STV tried to speak to several of the Bangladeshis, but the reporter’s questions were usually met with stares of incomprehension, and mutters of “I don’t speak English”. One of them claimed, in broken English, that he was a tourist. Another, who spoke some English, said he planned to return to Bangladesh within a fortnight, but could not explain what he planned to do in Mozambique.The suspicion is that the immigration authorities have stumbled across a racket in human trafficking, in which Bangladeshis are sent to southern Africa to work in sweatshops or other shady businesses. Possibly their final destination was not Mozambique at all, and the intention was to send them on to South Africa.Paulino told STV that this was far from the first time that passengers were caught with phony visas. “This phenomenon has become worse since Ethiopian airlines started operating in our airspace (in early December)”, he said. “Many of the passengers on Ethiopian Airlines are of Asian origin”.The Maputo director of Ethiopian Airlines, Hailu Woldekian, denied that his company was involved in any illegal immigration racket. He said that the Bangladeshis had all displayed passports with apparently valid entry visas, and all bought tickets.“Our responsibility is to transport them, and we did that, because they paid for their tickets and all other expenses”, he said. “Right now, our mission is to assist our clients”.