Sri Lanka couple with fake Malaysian passports held

CHENNAI: Police nabbed a couple from Sri Lanka at Chennai airport on Friday for attempting to board a flight to London using fake Malaysian passports .
The immigration officials handed over the couple to the Central Crime Branch (CCB) of police who launched a search for two people, who arranged the fake passports for Vijayan, 35, and Yasodha, 33, hailing from Vavuni Kulam in Sri Lanka.
The Tamil Nadu ‘Q’ branch is investigating if the couple had any role in the Sri Lankan civil war, which end in 2009. However, preliminary inquiries revealed that the couple was not part of any civil war in Sri Lanka.
The two had planned and executed collecting the fake Malaysian passport to migrate to London.
During interrogation, the couple told police they had approached a travel agent in Sri Lanka, who promised to get fake Malaysian passports for the couple through his contacts in Kuala Lumpur.
As per the plan orchestrated by the travel agent in Colombo, he asked the couple to travel to Chennai with their original Sri Lankan passport and they reached Chennai on Air India flight. The couple was asked to wait at the transit lounge where two others would come from Kuala Lumpur and hand over the fake Malaysian passports to them.
Soon after receiving the Malaysian passports from the agents, the couple rushed to the British Airways (BA) check-in counter to get their boarding passes.
The immigration officials, finding them suspicious, found out that the couple who used Sri Lankan passports on AI was about to board the BA flight using Malaysian passports. The couple was detained. On questioning, they confessed to buying fake passports. They were remanded to judicial custody after being produced before a magistrate court in the city.