A 29-year-old Nigerian has been arrested for attempting to acquire a visa with a fraudulently obtained Ghanaian passport. The man, whose actual name is William Wilson, had a passport bearing the name Yeboah Wilson William and his picture.
The passport, with the number G061359, indicated that it was issued on September 26, 2013 and would expire on September 25, 2018.
High Commission
Last Tuesday, January 21, 2013, William Wilson went to the Canadian High Commission with the passport which had a Schengen visa indicating he had visited Holland from October 19, 2013 to January 1, 2014.
Officials at the high commission, who were processing his visa documents, suspected that the Schengen visa and the immigration stamps indicating he had embarked at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra and disembarked at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam in Holland were fake.
The high commission, therefore, called the Document Fraud Unit of the Ghana Immigration Service to cross-check the authenticity of the passport and the visa applicant.
Officers of the unit, after conducting a profile check, found out that the passport was genuine even though the bearer was not a Ghanaian.
The passport had all the security features of a Ghanaian passport.
A Ghanaian from Ewe
During interrogation after his arrest, Wilson maintained that he was a Ghanaian even though his accent gave him up as a Nigerian.
He claimed to be a �Ghanaian from Ewe�.
That drew laughter from the Ghanaians as Ewe is a Ghanaian language spoken by the people of the Volta Region and not a name of a town where one could hail from.
Wilson was said to have claimed that he was attending a health and safety conference in Toronto, Canada.
He later admitted that he was a Nigerian from the Edo State and he had arrived in Ghana two weeks ago by road.
Wilson claimed that he traded in human hair for women and that the passport was acquired by his brother, Henry Wilson, who lived in Tema, through a Ghanaian by name Abdulai. He also claimed that he only visited the passport office in Ghana once to take a picture and have his fingerprints taken.
He has been charged with fraudulently acquiring a passport contrary to section 520 of the immigration act 2000(Act 573).
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