CBI on the lookout for smuggler with multiple fake passports

The economic wing has registered a case against Ubaidullah Farook of Pudupet on charges of criminal conspiracy, forgery of valuable security, forgery for purpose of cheating, using forged documents as genuine and knowingly furnishing false information or supress material information with a view to obtain passports between 1993 and 2016.

Ubaidullah, sources said, had been actively involved in smuggling electronic items and endangered animals from abroad besides handling his squad of kuruvis (couriers), adding that he was booked under COFEPOSA at least three times. “If my information is right, he had once helped the CBI to arrest a high profile DRI official in a bribery case six years ago,” a CBI source said.

In its FIR, the agency said after Ubaidullah was arrested by Customs officials at Chennai airport for trying to smuggle foreign exchange worth Rs 36.74 lakh in March 1994, his passport became invalid and he was ineligible to apply for a new passport.

He then applied a passport under the name Faizal Khan, with a fake address in Egmore in 1994 by submitting forged documents as proof of identity and residential address. He obtained passport in September 1994 and even had it re-issued through the Indian Mission in Hong Kong in 2001, through the Indian Consulate in Hong Kong again in 2007 besides from Chennai RPO in 2014.

In between, he applied and obtained a passport in the name of Hameed Feroz Khan in July 1996 with a Maduravoyal address. For this, he had forged documents to show him as a final year BSc student of a city college and also submitted fabricated bank documents. In 1999, he renewed the passport through the Indian High Commission in Singapore.

Sources said he had obtained another passport in the name of Ubaidullah Khan, son of Faizal, and had applied for renewal in 2015 by enclosing a forged affidavit said to be countersigned by a notary, along with a newspaper cutting purportedly publishing the change of his name from Faizal Khan to Faizal Ubaidullah Khan. He was issued a passport in that name in February 2016. Using this fake passport, he had travelled to Colombo, Singapore, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Bangkok, sources said.