Police arrest 11 for running fake passport racket

CHENNAI: The Chennai police on Monday busted a fake passport racket and arrested 11 people, including a VCK worker who contested the 2016 assembly election from the Sriperumbudur constituency, his brother and four Sri Lankan Tamils. The police said the gang had made fake passports for many Lankan Tamils to travel to other countries.


Police recovered 80 duplicate Indian passports, 12 Lankan passports, a laptop, hard disk, scanning machine, colour printer, fake seals - including a passport official seal - and Rs 85,000 from the men.

Following a tip-off, a police team from the forgery wing of the central crime branch of the city police raided a travel agency office in Triplicane and arrested M Veerakumar, 47, M Balu, 45, S Karthikeyan, 40, and V Saravanan, 43. Preliminary inquiries revealed that the team collected expired passports from people and forged the names and pasted new photos of Lankan Tamils who approached them to travel abroad.

The police said Veerakumar, a VCK worker and kingpin of the racket, is from Tuticorin.

Three Lankan Tamils brought customers and took around Rs 70,000 for each passport, an investigating officer said. "The racket had already sent a lot of people with fake passports to other countries around the world," he said.

CCB officials also arrested Veerakumar's brother M Balu alias Balasubramanian, 45, three Lankan Tamils J Balaji, 40, his brother J Kunalan, 48, and P Krishnamoorthy, 47. The others were identified as A Sakthivelu, 47, T Suresh, 50, A Umar Hussain, 47, S Karthikeyan, 40, V Saravanan, 42, and A Amjad Kumar, 36.