Danish authorities have found that 634 out of 700 asylum seekers under investigation for lying about their identity were claiming to be persecuted minorities in Kuwait but almost all were really from Iraq.
Over the course of several months, Danish authorities investigated the identities of 700 asylum seekers who claimed to be fleeing persecution in Kuwait. The vast majority of them, according to authorities, were from elsewhere and have been given a rejection to their asylum applications and will be deported Jyllands-Posten reports.
Anders Dorph, Deputy Director of the Immigration Service, responsible for asylum called the investigation very important and said, “We have previously seen cases of fraud where they try to lie about having another nationality to gain an advantage, but not to this extent.”
According to investigators almost half of the migrants, around 300 people, were from the same Iraqi family. The investigators say they found evidence through social media and international cooperation that showed the migrants to be from Iraq.
They even claimed to have found manuals detailing how migrants could scam the migration service and portray themselves as being stateless.
Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Professor of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden and Refugee Researcher said the manuals show the scale of the fraud is much larger than some may have anticipated.
“There’s a huge deal of forging documents and helping people to take on identities, where one can be fairly sure of getting asylum. If an Iraqi can increase his chance of getting asylum to 80-90 percent, then it may seem attractive to many to try another nationality,” he said.
86 Per Cent of Recently Tested ‘Underage’ Migrants in Sweden Are Actually Adults https://t.co/DX9UW4Xu6Y
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 7, 2017
Many of the migrants coming into Europe come without any form of identification making it hard for authorities to determine if they are who they claim to be. In Germany, some proposed looking into the migrant’s mobile phones to examine their origins.
Countries have also had issues with migrants claiming to be underage in order to get preferential treatment and make it harder for authorities to deport them. In Sweden, the Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) released a report showing that 86 percent of the “underage” migrants they tested turned out to be adults.
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