Crooked website sells NZ passports

By BRIDGET CARTER

Internal Affairs is moving to shut down a website offering New Zealand passports for sale illegally.

The website, discovered by the Herald yesterday, offers original passports from Australia and New Zealand for "the best prices on the net" among a selection of international documents.

Discussion on the website included questions over whether photos could be replaced and names changed.

Police said they would monitor the website to see if any passports were sold. But an Internal Affairs spokesman said it would contact the website's country of origin to have it shut down.

Meanwhile, police have refused to comment on claims of a link to al Qaeda terrorists following the seizure of fake New Zealand passports in Thailand.

However, Thailand's ambassador to New Zealand, Norachit Sinhaseni, said a statement from Thai police which claimed that their counterparts at the New Zealand Embassy had told them that passports with the same serial number were linked to a human trafficking syndicate and al Qaeda terrorists in Europe.

The head of New Zealand police counter-terrorism operations, Assistant Commissioner Jon White, told the Herald yesterday that comments by the Thai police were made without consultation with New Zealand police.

A Thai man and a Pakistani man have been arrested in connection with the fake passports. Among 23 fake documents seized in Thailand were 11 fake New Zealand passports with serial numbers beginning with N379. Police believe there are likely to be more.

Internal Affairs passport manager David Philp said for reassurance, New Zealanders with that series of numbers could get a replacement passport issued at no cost.

He said the department had already issued replacement passports after recent investigations found fake passports were being produced with those numbers.

The arrests come amid ongoing Thai and New Zealand police operations to stamp out the sale of fake New Zealand passports in Bangkok, a city notorious for the sale of counterfeit passports.

In February, Thai police arrested a German and a French man attempting to smuggle more than 400 fake European passports out of Bangkok airport.

In a similar security scare in March last year a man with al Qaeda links was arrested in Namibia with a New Zealand passport stolen from Bangkok.

New Zealand's police liaison officer in Bangkok, Detective Inspector Mike Bush, who worked with Thai police on the latest operation, said they were working hard to prevent fake New Zealand passports being available on the black market because of the potential for them to be used by terrorists.

"It ups the ante in respect of our investigations," he said.

Border authorities had been alerted to the false passports and they were not sophisticated enough to fool controls in countries where passport reading systems were used.

New Zealand is reviewing its security amid publicity of stolen passports and the case involving two Israeli men arrested here for fraudulently trying to obtain New Zealand passports.

New information is likely to be stored on passports after October.

Microchips will carry "biometric" information (biological and statistical data combined), a replicated digital photo and other identification marks which can be confirmed against the printed photo and other details.

Some New Zealand overseas diplomatic posts which have previously issued passports that cannot be read by machines are now restricting these to limited-duration documents for emergency cases only.

Passport controls

NZ passport security features include:

* Passport number embossed into top of each page.

* Identification photo printed seamlessly into inside cover, cannot be removed or replaced manually.

* Watermarks on pages.

* Other features readable by ultra-violet light - Internal Affairs Department will not for security reasons disclose details of these.

* Extra feature on the 97 per cent of NZ passports which are "machine-readable" - numbered computer code containing basic information for border officials to check against printed details of identity, date of birth, etc.