75 travelers with bogus papers barred at DMIA

CLARK FREEPORT, Pampanga – Seventy-five people using fake passports, fake credit cards to pay for their plane tickets or fake documents to justify their purported employment abroad were barred from leaving the country through the Diosdado Maca­pagal International Airport (DMIA) in June alone.

This, as the Bureau of Immigration has imposed tighter screening following reports of human smuggling at the DMIA.

The bureau also reported rejecting the entry here of 37 foreigners with bogus travel documents in the first semester of the year.

In a meeting the other day with visiting Malaysian foreign affairs and immigration officials at the DMIA, officials of the Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC) reported that since last June 23, 45 people were offloaded or prevented from boarding planes bound for abroad after their passports were found to be fake.

Thirty other people were also barred from leaving after they tried to pay for their plane tickets using fake credit cards.

CIAC officials brought to the attention of the Malaysian officials the plight of local women, mostly from resettlement sites for victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruption in Central Luzon, who end up as prostitutes in Sandaka, Malaysia.

Earlier, the women’s group Ing Makababaing Aksyon Foundation Inc. reported that some 200 women from Pampanga have to be rescued from prostitution dens in Sandaka. 

An Angeles City judge has issued an arrest order for a woman who allegedly led a syndicate recruiting local women to work as housemaids in Malaysia but end up there as prostitutes.