A Malaysian man was arrested at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) for trying to leave the country with a fake Philippine passport. On Friday, Toong Yuen Chin, 36, attempted to leave the Philippines and fly to Kuala Lumpur. Immigration officers became suspicious of the man when his passport could not be scanned.
According to Grifton Medina, port operations chief of the Bureau of Immigration (BI), the passport had the name Jacky Cruz Chin, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported.
“During secondary inspection, he confessed his true nationality as a Malaysian and admitted that a fixer named Lawrence facilitated his acquisition of a fraudulent Philippine passport for a fee,” Medina said.
Chin will be detained in compliance with Immigration Commissioner Jaime Morente’s directive that all alien travelers caught using spurious documents be prosecuted for violating Philippine immigration laws.
Glen Comia, a senior immigration officer who heads the BI travel control and enforcement unit at NAIA Terminal 3, said records showed that Chin last arrived in the Philippines on July 12, 2018, using his Malaysian passport.