CAIRO, 31 January 2003 — Egyptian tourist police arrested a travel agency owner and an airline liaison official last week over a scam that was costing each Haj pilgrim 250 Egyptian pounds. They were paying for an airline reservation which in fact did not exist.
Each victim, after purchasing a legitimate air ticket, paid the additional fee for a confirmed seating reservation. Upon arrival at the airport, the traveler would find that no reservation existed and he was put on the standby list.
With the Haj season just over a week away, Egyptian police are working with Saudi authorities to prevent a reoccurrence of last year’s confusion when 27 Egyptian pilgrims in Jeddah and 54 in Madinah were deported after it was suspected that their Haj visas were forged. The deportations last year were caused by travel and tour agents in Egypt attempting to work their way around their Haj visa allotments.
Saudi authorities at the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah last year found that several pilgrims arrived in the Kingdom with visas issued at the Embassy in Berlin, Germany, despite the fact that the pilgrims themselves had never visited Germany. The embassy in Berlin was unable to confirm whether the visas were legitimate or not, and entry into the Kingdom to perform Haj was denied to those having German issued visas.
Saudi authorities contacted Egyptian police and arrests were made at the travel agency that issued the majority of those visas.
In the subsequent investigation, it was discovered that the visas were indeed valid. Saudi Arabia allots 1,000 Haj visas per one million residents per country. Since the demand for Haj visas is so high in Egypt, some travel agencies in the past accepted visa applications from Egyptian nationals in Egypt and then traveling to countries such as Germany — which have a relatively low Muslim population per capita — to get the visas issued from the Saudi consulate there. This practice is not illegal, but goes against the wishes of the Kingdom.
“The Egyptian quota of pilgrim visas — 68,000 — usually falls short of local demand, while in some foreign countries like Germany, the requests are fewer,” explained Elhamy El- Zayyat, chairman of the Egyptian Travel Agencies Association. “To satisfy local demand, some Egyptian travel agencies resort to obtaining visas from Saudi embassies in countries where there are few Muslims. The practice has always been widespread and perfectly legal.”
When Saudi passport authorities discovered last year that some Egyptian nationals had visas issued in Germany in their passport, but had never visited Germany, they suspected that the visas were forgeries. A report by the Saudi consulate in Egypt claims that the visas are authentic, despite earlier claims by the Saudi consul in Berlin, Elwi Said Elwi, who said that they were “counterfeit.”
Elwi had earlier told Al-Ahram newspaper that the visas in question “may appear authentic, but are not listed in the official records of the consulate.”
Following the release of the report, the consul refused to confirm whether the official stamp was stolen from the consulate in Berlin and used in the issuance of visas.
Additional reporting by Gihane Shahine of Al-Ahram Weekly.
