Originally Posted by
Kallio
Or they could have used their Iranian passports to exit Malayasia. I have never been there but in my experience the exit immigrations are usually only interested about the entry stamp to catch overstayers. They don't often care about boarding passes or identity you have provided to an airline.
In any case, it seems more and more that it was just a mundane case of illegal immigration. Most likely they would have been caught in Amsterdam because AFAIK Schengen countries do check passports against Interpol database, and airline would have been fined.
Most Schengen countries do
not check most passenger passports against the Interpol passport database when those passengers arrive at a Schengen port for admission into the Schegen zone.
Given these men were likely to claim asylum in Europe, getting caught with a stolen passport in Europe would not ruin that plan.
Claiming asylum -- when asylum is due -- is not necessarily considered a case of illegal immigration even when stolen ID is part of the escape plan to find asylum. At least for countries that are signatory to some multilateral agreements related to such matters. That said, a lot of asylum claims are but a desperate move by economic refugees or those seeking family reunification.
This further weakens the reputation of the Malaysian immigration service. It appears that they used their real Iranian passports to enter Malaysia (including being fingerprinted), then received the stolen documents in-country. Presumably they would discard the stolen documents after leaving PEK
We will never find out but I suppose the "passport service" also included the addition of some fake stamps, which means Malaysian officials failed to detect that their own entry stamp was fake/stolen. Are exiting passengers also fingerprinted in KUL, in which case this makes a farce of the whole fingerprinting thing?
Furthermore, Mr. Kozel is apparently 61 but MH records his age as 30 in the manifest. The CCTV images do not appear to show Mr. Mehrdad disguised as a 61-year-old, so I wonder if the DOB and MRZ were both altered - which I expect would be quite difficult to achieve (without making the document obviously fake) compared to pilfering a stamp.
I've entered and exited Malaysia in circumstances where they couldn't find my entry stamps to marry with the exit stamps. I've also had the same thing happen in dozens of other countries that also use exit stamps. It doesn't necessarily indicate anything about the immigration authorities of the host/visited country having failed at the airport.
About the age thing, some parent-adult child pairs pass off as siblings in age. Not that it is a given in this circumstance, but it wouldn't be the first time a thin, healthy lifestyle Iranian in his upper 50s or lower 60s was able to pass as someone in or close to the 30s age group. Not common, but possible. And some Iranians are perceived as ethnic "Italian" or "Slovenian" but have children who are perceived as something different -- like "Indian" or "Dominican" or "Middle Eastern". Welcome to a cosmopolitan world with a long history of international migration and what it has meant for human reproduction and genetic diversity within the species and even within given national groups within our species.
Depending on the base document used for the fraud, a DOB change in the MRZ would be easily do-able and may not be noticed easily. [The effectiveness of the fraud is less when there is RFID chips involved, but many passports still don't have them or have them as non-functional.] It's rare for passport control types to look at the MRZ and make sure what is there matches what is otherwise on the rest of the biodata page. People are generally far from great proofreaders against "copy", especially when the "copy" being proofed against is electronic or not standard text on flat, plain paper free of adornments.