Iranian held with fake passport

KOCHI: An Iranian national was arrested from the Cochin International Airport on Friday after he allegedly attempted to travel with a fake Danish passport to Canada.The accused, Ehsan Bagher Lejad, 28, hailing from Tehran, was taken into custody by the immigration officials after finding discrepancies in his passport. He is being questioned by the Nedumbassery police and various intelligence agencies.The accused, carrying a Danish passport with the name Peter Henrik, was to travel to Montreal by Jet Airways transit flight via Doha when the counter officer at the Kochi airport noted the contrariety. The Danish Embassy in Delhi found that the above-said passport was issued to a Danish lady named Mona, who had lost it in May 2011. On interrogation, the accused confessed to have obtained a fake passport for a sum of $6,000 from an Iranian friend based in Tehran. The accused said that he had come to India in November 2010 on a student visa to attend a 10-month course in English from Osmania University in Hyderabad. Four months ago, he went back to Tehran to mourn the death of his mother, during which he entrusted his Iranian friend Ali Raza to obtain a Danish passport for him. Upon his return, a fake passport was handed over to him in Hyderabad by a friend from the same university, he told the immigration officials. The accused submitted before the immigration officials that he was an MTech graduate in power engineering from Azad University in Tehran. He wanted to go to Canada owing to the religious fundamentalism and the lack of freedom in Iran. He took the English course in India to be able to migrate to Canada. “The name has been verified after accessing his bank account but the other details are yet to be ascertained unless we obtain the original passport,” a top official with the immigration wing said.