Antigua to carefully check Guyanese immigration documents
Stabroek News
January 9, 2004
(Antigua Sun) Immigra-tion authorities in Antigua & Barbuda will be paying closer attention to immigration documents carried by Guyanese entering the country.
Word of this has come from Chief Immigration Officer Colonel Clyde Walker who disclosed that he himself based on the powers vested in him will be prosecuting any foreign national who tries to enter the country illegally.
Colonel Walker's stance comes after a passport scam involving fake Barbados passports was uncovered in Barbados and Antigua & Barbuda.
He noted that Guyanese nationals in particular cannot enter the US, England or Canada without a visa and they find it very difficult (to get one) so they resort to fraudulent means.
"Some of them are willing to pay up to US$4,000 to obtain a passport illegally," he says.
Colonel Walker recalled that during the month of December 2003 "we arrested at least four people with fraudulent passports, we have since deported them, but for the New Year I am going to prosecute them myself."
Barbados Chief Im-migration Officer Gilbert Greaves has been quoted in the Barbados Daily Nation newspaper as saying that "immigration officers in Antigua nabbed a Guyanese national with three fake Barbados passports and two fake Barbados identification cards, while their counterparts in Grenada held a family of three who had made eight Barbados passports into three."