Man held for issuing fake UK visas and passports for undocumented immigrants

United Kingdom, 3rd May: An elderly man in the UK has been found to be producing fake UK visas and UK passports to help undocumented immigrants get UK citizenship.

For this service, he used to earn thousands of pounds paid by undocumented immigrants and was able to stay away from the prying eyes of the UK Home Office.

It has been found that nearly 15,000 undocumented immigrants benefited from the services of 76 year old Abdullah Azad by gaining UK visas on bogus documents produced by this man. 

According to prosecutors of Azad, the undocumented immigrants in the UK who were provided false UK visas enjoyed several privileges, employment, state benefits and continuous residence in the UK.

Azad is now behind bars for a period of five years allegedly for the scam involving use of letters, stamps and endorsements of the UK Home Office as well as national insurance number cards, college letters and stamps.

This father-of-two showed himself as Afzal Khan, a former Lord Mayor of Manchester, and sought help of a local MP Graham Stringer for an immigration case.

Azad had been convicted of a similar kind of offence related to illegal UK immigration nearly eight years ago.

Earlier, way back in 2007, Azad’s office in Moss Slide was raided by the SOCA (Serious and Organized Crime Agency) during which 400 foreign passports, cash and files of 5,000 families concerning 15,000 people were seized.  

Although, some of his clients knew that Azad was involved in illegal UK immigration, but, majority of his clients were on legal UK student visas or UK work permits and had absolutely no idea about this truth of their agent whom they believed to be legal immigrant lawyer.

According to a SOCA source, a large number of his clients are still untraceable and had cost nearly millions to the taxpayers in the UK.

Seeing the case of Mr. Azad, its clear that certain loopholes are there in the UK immigration system, commented Damian Green, the Shadow Immigration Minister. He added UK immigration officials need to weed out any laxity in UK immigration rules so that such acts should do not get repeated.