An al Qaeda chief was issued with nine British passports while he plotted to kill thousands of Londoners with a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’, officials admitted today.
Dhiren Barot, 34, got two passports using false identities and seven in his own name before his arrest in August 2004 - often by simply claiming he had lost them and applying for replacements
Barot, a former airline ticket clerk of Kingsbury, north-west London, also planned to create carnage on a “colossal and unprecedented scale” by putting limousines packed with gas cylinders in car parks underneath office blocks.
Referred to as Osama bin Laden’s “UK general”, he was sentenced to serve at least 40 years last November.
Another two British passports were obtained by Salaheddine Benyaich, a Moroccan serving 18 years for involvement in the 2003 bombings in Casablanca in which 44 people were killed. Benyaich fooled officials by using the identity of a man born in Brighton.
The two cases emerged in a Home Office report which revealed that as many as 10,000 fake passports are issued each year to criminals, terrorists and others making fraudulent applications.
Other cases highlighted involved a large scale illegal immigration racket with 2,500 false applications from people reporting to be of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin, as well as other cases involving the use of the identities of dead children or adults.
The figures were revealed in a Home Office report which said that around 16,500 fraudulent applications were made each year of which around two thirds went undetected.
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