Another major passport scandal is brewing at the Immigration Department in Belmopan tonight and this time it's because 200 passports have disappeared. 7NEWS has confirmed that the passports were stolen from a processing office within the Department of Immigration.
The discovery was made by department staff on Monday morning. They found that the office appeared to have been broken into and two boxes, containing one hundred passports each had been stolen. The curious thing is that there are no signs that anyone broke into the building, but they did apparently break into the office where the passports were stored. This suggests to police that it was an inside job and last night a female immigration staffer was detained. Up to newstime this evening, she remained in police custody. Police say they have a list of persons all from within the department who they wish to question in connection with the theft.
7NEWS has learned that the processing room where the passports were stored had very low security. That's may come as a surprise, knowing that the room should safeguard the country's most precious national documents, and knowing the past history of corruption that has transpired and thrived in the department. But securing that room and its contents appeared not to have been a priority for Director Carmen Zetina, and his de-facto Deputy Melicio Uck, both imports from the Police Department who took over earlier this year.
Now, the Government of Belize is facing a considerable international embarrassment. First, the United States was instrumental in upgrading the Belizean passport to machine readable standards, for the stated reason of greater international security. And the fact that now, 200 machine readable passports are floating around and could end up in the hands of anyone will certainly appear to the Americans to pose a significant international security risk.
We stress that these passports were blank, which is to say, not machine encoded but it's foreseeable that international document forgers would not have a hard time getting around that.
And while the government will have some explaining to do with the U.S., the effect will most likely be felt by Belizeans who may experience even greater difficulty traveling with a Belizean passport that has again been devalued by corruption and criminality. On a slender upside, authorities do know the serial number of the missing passports, but finding them will be quite another matter. Investigators believe it is not just a random act of theft. They believe that someone on the inside was contracted by an immigration interest to steal the passports and these passports have since changed hands to an agent who will traffic them internationally. That, again, is the police theory but is speculative until further investigation shows that there was a criminal conspiracy.
