Dubai passport official accepted Dh2.65m in bribes to falsify exit reports

DUBAI // A passport control officer took millions of dirhams in bribes for altering records to wrongly show that almost 5,300 people had left the country.

Between August 2007 and August 2012, Dubai Naturalisation and Residency Department worker A A was paid Dh2.65 million to alter computer information for 5,291 people.

At Dubai Criminal Court on Wednesday the Emirati, 30, was found guilty of accepting bribes, forging official documents and use of forged documents by saving them on the department’s system.

He was sentenced to two years in prison and fined Dh2.5m.

After a tip-off about his activities, an internal investigation found he had been amending the departure data, while his job was to work on arrivals.

M O, 45, an Emirati department inspector, said he cross-checked a list of names the officer saved in the system as departures against airline passenger lists.

“I discovered that the people on the list did not leave the country,” the inspector said.

When quizzed by prosecutors, the officer admitted he would receive a list of people whose exit status he should falsify by text message from a contact in Pakistan.

Another man would pay him off at a drop-off point in Al Quoz.

The officer denied the charges in court. When he was presented with a list of names of people whose departure data he had forged, he denied knowing anything about them.