Amoateng Travelled On Forged Passport — Immigration Officer

An Immigration officer of the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS) Wednesday told the Accra Circuit Court that a former Member of Parliament for Nkoranza North, Eric Amoateng, travelled from the United States of America to Ghana on a forged passport.

Mr Ibrahim Lang-Hani, an Assistant Controller of the GIS stationed at the Kotoka Airport, told the court that Amoateng arrived at the airport on August 7, 2014, with a passport that had been embossed twice and had its original photo substituted.

Led in evidence by the prosecutor, Deputy Superintendent of Police (DSP) Mr Aidan Dery, the witness said when Amoateng arrived in Ghana, he (witness), first checked the passport to see if its number of pages were intact.

He said after assessing the passport he observed that though the 32-page document was intact its original photo had been removed and “when I checked the digits in the machine readable zone I found that they were not correct.

“When I put the bio data page under the ultraviolet light, it glowed, indicating that the page was not a security paper.”

He told the court, presided over by Ms Vivian Ellen Amoah, that the thumb tracking edge of the bio data page was double, indicating that the “photo had been embossed twice.”

“This shows that the original photo in the passport had been removed and embossed with a new one,” he told the court.

He stated that immediately he collected the passport from Amoateng and told him that the pages had been forged, Amoateng expressed shock.

Mr Lang-Hani tendered in the passport and the disembarkation form, both of which the counsel of the accused person, Mr Charles Puozuing, did not object to.

Mr Lang-Hani stated that after his analysis of Amoateng's passport at the airport, he wrote a report to the Director of the GIS, Dr Peter Wiredu, and kept a copy.

When the court asked him to produce a copy of the report in his possession, he could not do so, prompting the prosecution to pray the court to adjourn the trial for the witness to make available the document to the court tomorrow.

However, Mr Pouzuing expressed reservations over the inability of the prosecution to produce the witness's report, saying that while “justice must be seen to be done, it must be done timeously and not in piece-­meal.”