Bangladeshi who forged work permits for other expatriates arrested

A Bangladeshi man who forged work permits for other expatriates who were in Maldives illegally was arrested by the Police, the Maldives Police Service said last Thursday.At a Police news conference, the Head of the Commercial Crime Unit Inspector Ismail Athif said the man directly responsible for the forged work permits was a Bangladeshi man named Arushad Miya who worked at a photocopy shop in G. Konantaa.Athif said that the Police had confiscated the computers and scanners at the shop called Classy and had found more than 450 fake work permits stored on the computers.“They include copies of the work permits issued by the Labour Ministry and work permit cards,” Athif said. “When we searched the shop we also found some forgeries that hadn’t been finished yet, finished ones, and still other documents related to forging such documents. Even when the Police arrived to arrest the man, there were two expatriates working on fake work permit cards there.”Athif said that so far Arushad and those two people who had been working on the fake work permit cards at the time of arrest were the only people who had been arrested in connection with the crime. He also said that the forensic evidence had shown that Labour Ministry’s stamp that had been on the fake permits were scanned copies. Since so many fake work permits had been forged by Arushad, the Police were working in collaboration with the Labour Ministry to seek them out, Athif said.Abdulla Saeed, Arushad’s sponsor and the owner of the shop in which Arushad had made the forged work permits, was unaware of Arushad’s criminal activities, Athif said. He also said that Arushad had been in the business of making forged work permits for around four or five months now and that he charged Rf 5 for the service