A woman was fined €650 for possession of a forged passport despite insisting that she did not know her uncle had fooled her and that the passport office at home in Zimbabwe, which has a 300,000 backlog, had run out of the proper paper.
Elsie Chirwa (30 ) with an address at 41 Ashbrook, Oranmore, appeared at Galway District Court last Monday and pleaded not guilty to using a false instrument at Galway Garda Station, Mill Street on June 27, 2008, and to failing to produce on demand a valid passport or other equivalent document.
Garda David Cormican of the Immigration Office gave evidence that when the defendant called to the office for purposes of registration the passport had a “bad read” when it was scanned. The passport was then sent to the Documents Section in Pheonix Park, Dublin, and a number of problems were found with the bio-data page. The defendant was then arrested on August 4, 2008, on suspicion of having forged the document.
Documents expert Detective Sgt Raymond Jackman told the court that the passport itself was genuine but that the original bio-page was removed, causing damage along the spine of the passport. He said that the passport could have belonged to someone else and that it wasn’t a “particularly good forgery”.
Chirwa, who came to Ireland to join her husband in 2004, said that the embassy in London told her that there was a backlog and it would take nine months. She was unable to travel home herself to get the passport because she was pregnant so she decided to phone her uncle in Harare, instructing him to get forms from the passport office. Chirwa filled these forms in and sent them back to her uncle and sent $200 through the Western Union. Chirwa told the court that the passport office had run out of paper for passports. The mother of two denied knowing that there was anything wrong, stating that it had been stamped by the Immigration Office before and that she had travelled to Finland in December 2007. The embassy also told her since that others had been issued with documents that were not genuine.
Defence solicitor Aine Feeney explained that Zimbabwian newspaper articles showed that there had been a backlog of 300,000. She added that the embassy are no long issuing passports, only travel documents.
When asked by Inspector Ernie White why she had not sent the forms directly to the passport office Chirwa replied that it had been just before the elections, that the forms would have got lost, and that it was better to have someone she could trace. She then admitted that she had been fooled by her uncle who has since passed away. She also had no proof of sending the US $200.
“The defendant’s evidence is so weak and tenuous that I cannot accept it,” said Judge Mary Fahy, who fined Chirwa a total of €650 with four months to pay.
