Bangladeshi woman, 2 sisters held in UP for staying in India with passports obtained on fake IDs

Bareilly (UP), Aug 22 (PTI) Police on Friday arrested a Bangladeshi woman and her two sisters for allegedly living in India for years using forged identities and obtaining Indian passports on fabricated documents, officials said.

According to police, the main accused, Munara Bi, not only managed to stay in India on false papers, but also procured three separate Indian passports, which she used for repeated foreign travel, including trips to Bangladesh and Dubai.

Investigations revealed that Munara Bi, who posed as a resident of Maulanagar in Bareilly, was in fact originally from Jessore district of Khulna, Bangladesh. She first obtained an Indian passport in 2011, and in 2012, managed to secure another passport under the name of her sister, Saira Bano, while using her own photograph. On this passport, she travelled abroad multiple times.

Later, she allegedly procured a third passport from the Indian Embassy in Kuwait after the earlier one expired, police said.

Police said Munara's sisters — Saira Bano and Taslima — both residents of Hafizganj, Bareilly, had also been living in India on forged identities.

The Prem Nagar police station SHO, Ashutosh Raghuvanshi, said that on the complaint of Sub-Inspector Viresh Bhardwaj, an FIR has been registered against the accused under charges of cheating, impersonation, forgery, besides provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946, the Passport Act, and Section 35 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016.

Police suspect the three are part of a larger network facilitating illegal entry and fake documentation for foreign nationals, the SHO said.

Further investigations are underway to identify their associates and local facilitators, he added. PTI COR KIS HIG HIG