Bhubaneswar: In an interesting incident, a retired employee of Oil Odisha found that he could not travel abroad in spite of having a legal passport as someone else had gone abroad using a fake passport containing all the particulars of his identity.
The clueless authorities of Bhubaneswar Passport Office have been delaying the renewal of the retired Oil Odisha employee’s passport as someone else was using his identity through a fake passport.
The victim, Bimbadhara Sahoo, a resident of Dukladei Road in Old Bhubaneswar, had applied for the passport in 1986 in order to go abroad on official duty. He obtained the passport (No: V325360), but the trip was cancelled due to unknown reasons.
Bimbadhara renewed his passport for the last time in 1991. He did not renew the passport after that as he had no plans to go abroad till a few months back.
Bimbadhara came to know about the fraud when he went to the Regional Passport Office recently for renewing his passport to visit his daughter staying in Saudi Arabia.
The incident proves that gangs of fake passport brokers are active at the Regional Passport Office in Bhubaneswar. This incident has raised questions about the close links between brokers and some officers at the passport office.
Some passport officials were suspended after the CBI probe into the fake passport racket of 1995 and the fleeing of Dawood Ibrahim and his men involved in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.