Photo: Messenger
Four current and former officials of the Department of Immigration and Passports (DIP) may be implicated in former inspector general of police (IGP) Benazir Ahmed's passport fraud. They are Dhaka divisional passport office Director Abdullah Al Mamun, former additional director general Fazlul Haque, sacked Munsi Mueed Ikram, and retired Abu Asad.
All of them are known as corrupt officials. A case is ongoing against Abdullah Al Mamun on charges of illegal wealth acquisition. The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) interrogated eight passport officials, including the aforementioned four, on Tuesday morning. A three-member ACC team is investigating the assets of Benazir. ACC Deputy Director Hafizul Islam is the head of the team while the other members are assistant directors Niamul Hasan Ghazi and Zainal Abedin.
Sources said the four passport officials went to the ACC office at 10am. After that, the investigation team started questioning them. After about four and a half hours of questioning, the four left after 2:30pm. None of them spoke to journalists. ACC officials did not say anything about the interrogation. Several attempts were made to contact Abdullah Al Mamun on mobile phone, but he did not receive the calls.
On behalf of the investigation team, Hafizul issued a letter to the director general of the DIP on June 13 to quiz the officials involved in Benazir’s passport fraud. The letter said the persons concerned should be present at the ACC head office on June 25. The four came on Tuesday in this regard.
The complaint against Benazir is that he did not apply for a blue official passport by identifying himself as a government employee. Despite having the opportunity, he did not apply for the red passport. He took over as the 30th IGP in 2020. As per rules, he was supposed to get a diplomatic passport as an officer of the rank of senior secretary. But as an IGP, he applied for a normal passport identifying himself as a private job holder. Due to the introduction of e-passports in the country by then, complications arose over his application.
According to sources, at that time, Benazir resorted to unprecedented frauds. He asked for the mobile unit of DIP on the pretext of serious illness that restricted his mobility. Later, officials went to his house and completed all the formalities for passport application, including taking his photograph and fingerprint. These were done in secret. His application was submitted on March 4, 2020.
Benazir received his first machine readable passport (MRP) by submitting a handwritten passport. The handwritten passport number was E0017616. This passport was issued from the Agargaon office. It was an official passport.
The first MRP passport application form was accepted as an official passport. But some officers fraudulently issued the passport as an ordinary one. When his biometric and personal information was submitted to the MRP system by the operator, the information was changed to an ordinary entry instead of an official passport. This task was done by the enrollment officer in the MRP scheme. The passport number was AA1073252.
Later, on 16 September 2014, an application was submitted for passport renewal based on the same information. The number of that passport was BC0111070. Subsequently, on 14 December 2016, he again applied for renewal of the MRP passport. In that application, he changed his emergency contract address.
At that time, the officer who was in charge sent a letter requesting him to submit a departmental no-objection certificate (NOC). In view of that, a NOC was submitted from the RAB headquarters. The passport was then issued with the number BM0828141.
He last received an e-passport on March 4, 2020 bearing number B00002095, where he mentioned private service as his occupation. The application for this passport was received through the mobile team and the passport was approved by Abdullah Al Mamun. However, Mamun did not take any NOC in this case.
Messenger/Disha
