RIYADH, 25 July — About 5,610 Saudi passports have been stolen or lost in the past eight months, 4,900 of them inside the Kingdom, a security source told Arab News.
The source said 710 Saudi passports were stolen or lost mainly in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, Turkey, Indonesia, France, Britain and the United States.
In Jordan, the stolen Saudi passports are bought by Iraqis to use them to travel to foreign countries to improve their living conditions. In other countries, the passports are normally used in criminal activity.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States in which 15 of the 19 suspected hijackers carried Saudi passports, Saudi authorities have urged nationals to take better care of their travel documents.
Saudi nationals and expatriates living in the Kingdom have also been cautioned to beware of fraudsters who might use their identity documents in criminal and terrorist acts.
The largest number of lost passports was reported in Riyadh, followed by Jeddah, Dammam and Al-Ahsa.
"Most thefts of Saudi passports in France and Britain took place at airports. In the United States, Saudis lost their passports while sending them to the Kingdom’s embassy through courier service," the source pointed out.
Saudi Arabia has a population of 22 million, of whom 16 million are Saudis. Hundreds of thousands of Saudis travel abroad during the summer months to escape the scorching heat.
Fingerprinting
Meanwhile, Lt. Col. Fahd Al-Dakkan, director of public affairs at the Passports Department, told Arab News that studies were under way to register fingerprints of expatriates to identify them quickly.
Lt. Col. Dakkan said the experiment had been successful during the last Haj season.
Dakkan said the fingerprint system would be introduced with the implementation of new residence permits (iqamas). "It will help identify expatriate workers quickly and reduce crimes," he added. This system, he said, has been successfully implemented in the United States, Germany and Japan.
Dakkan said the new Saudi passports with barcodes would help prevent forgery to a great extent.
He called upon civil status departments, banks and other service organizations to adopt the fingerprint technology as quickly as possible to prevent forgery.
In a related development, Saudi passport officers arrested 70 expatriates, mainly Yemenis, for carrying stolen Saudi identity cards.
"Facial resemblance of the expatriates with the photos carried by the IDs helped them evade previous inspections," the source said.
