JEDDAH, 4 October 2005 — The Indian Consulate in Jeddah yesterday tried to distance itself from the controversy surrounding a 25-year-old Saudi woman from Taif who escaped to India with her alleged husband on forged documents.
The couple — Saudi national Thawab and her 28-year-old Indian husband Hidayat Sarwat Khan — are currently awaiting trial in a Bombay jail, as reported in Arab News yesterday.
“An emergency certificate or EC cannot be issued without verifying the identity and nationality of the person. It is a foolproof system,” said Hifzur Rahman, press and information consul at the Consulate General of India in Jeddah. Bombay police, however, claim that one Noorul Habib forged documents that enabled Thawab to obtain an emergency certificate.
Rahman said consular officials regularly visited the deportation center at the request of the Passport Department in order to interview people who are in need of ECs. He said the consulate would not comment on the Thawab case because it has no details.
“It is a classic case of media frenzy in which reporters quote officials out of context,” he added.
Officials who have handled such cases in the past say Thawab may have traveled to India on a forged passport rather than a forged EC.
“Forging a passport is much easier than forging an EC. You only have to remove the picture of the original holder and replace it with another one. This is done in some of Jeddah’s and Riyadh’s more notorious places,” said a Saudi immigration official.
According to standard operating procedure followed in issuing an EC, a person who is in jail without travel documents and passports approaches his or her consulate through the Passport Department. The consulate officials then interview the person in jail to verify the nationality claims. Only then is the EC issued and only for the person’s return to his country of origin. ECs are not issued to a person who is not physically present before the issuing officer.
It is common knowledge among the Kingdom’s overstayers and runaway domestics that the easiest way out of the country is to get rid of your passport and other papers and then get arrested during one of the numerous raids conducted by the Passport Department. Once in jail, it is that department which approaches the various consulates for an EC for those in detention. The department takes care of everything, including issuing tickets to the detainees.
According to immigration officials in India, those traveling on ECs face interrogation on arrival by the intelligence agencies.
“They are not let off easily,” said one official. “The intelligence agencies try to satisfy themselves by calling the police in the area where the person claims to live,” he added.
This procedure is known to be particularly severe at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi but not so in Bombay. If Thawab had indeed traveled on a forged EC, as claimed by the Bombay police, then this raises the legitimate question as to how she was allowed into the country by the Indian intelligence especially since she doesn’t speak any Indian language. The couple were arrested only after Thawab’s family lodged a complaint with the Saudi Consulate in Bombay.
This is not the first such case that India has had to deal with. In 2002, a 23-year-old Kuwaiti girl, Dhalal Falag Al-Azmi, landed at Chennai International Airport with her Indian boyfriend, Qader Badshah. She had traveled to India on forged papers and they too were arrested. Kuwait had demanded her repatriation but India has turned down the appeal, saying she would face the death penalty on return.
