As reported by Russkaya Germaniya, representatives of several federal states accuse the management of BaMF of negligence, pointing out that the agency cannot distinguish genuine refugee passports from fake ones.
Bavaria's Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann has made serious complaints about the work of officials at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in Nuremberg: random checks of passports and identification of refugees in the federal state often reveal inconsistencies. 'I don't understand why BaMF officials, who have the opportunity to thoroughly examine each document, cannot tell genuine passports from forgeries,' said the head of the Bavarian Interior Ministry in an interview with the public-law information radio station RBB-Inforadio.
In many other federal states, local supervisory bodies also do not rely on the results of document checks carried out within the walls of the Office for Migration and Refugees. For example, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern alone, law enforcement officers identified 140 fake Syrian passports during a check of 3,300 documents. Several of these documents had previously undergone inspection at BaMF and raised no objections, and three owners of fake documents who were impersonating others are considered by intelligence agencies to be connected with terrorists.
Potential shortcomings of the officials at the Office for Migration and Refugees are causing distrust among the authorities of Brandenburg. The prosecutor general of that state, Erardo Rautenberg, decided to confiscate about 18,000 asylum cases reviewed in Nuremberg to get a clearer picture of what refugees arrived in Brandenburg in 2015. Rautenberg, stating that 'he does not want to blame himself for lack of foresight if something happens in the state,' demanded that the documents be handed over personally by the head of BaMF, Frank-Jürgen Weise.
Representatives of the federal office are making every effort to defend themselves against the allegations. Officials claim that no official complaints about fake passports have been received from any state – including Bavaria. BaMF assures that they take document checks with all seriousness and due diligence to identify forgeries.
It is widely known that some of the refugees who arrived in Germany in 2015 presented fake passports, and an even larger number of immigrants had no documents at all. Of the 53,603 passports checked since March 2016, 3,311 have been found to be fake. Thus, the quota of suspected forgeries is about six percent, and law enforcement officers on the ground identify fewer 'fake' passports than the officials of the federal office.
Joachim Herrmann finds these explanations insufficient: the actual number of forgeries could be higher, the Bavarian minister fears, since the competent authorities in many states do not conduct additional checks, relying on BaMF data. Herrmann is not prepared to be satisfied with the excuses of its management: 'We are facing serious problems with internal security, which in the interests of our population we should not ignore,' explained the head of the Bavarian Interior Ministry about the intention to soon discuss the pressing issue of fake refugee passports with the head of the federal interior ministry, Thomas de Maizière.