Senate Committee to Visit Immigration Department in Belmopan

Aldo Salazar

The Senate Inquiry into the corruption at the Immigration Department resumes this Wednesday. At least two persons are scheduled to testify before the Senate Special Select Committee. Now, the Belize Passport Information System (BPIS) has been a center of inquiry throughout the public hearings of the Senate Special Select Committee. It is the system used to process passports and nationality certificates, and does hundreds, if not thousands of each, per month. But one particular entry in September of 2013 has thrown its integrity into question. The Committee’s chairman, Aldo Salazar, says he still cannot fathom how it is that a picture of a picture of Won Hong Kim, who was never in Belize, entered the system and was affixed to his fraudulent passport and fraudulent nationality certificate. For that reason, he told reporters last week, the Committee plans to visit the Immigration Department in Belmopan sometime in the near future, to see what it can see.

Aldo Salazar, Chair, Senate Special Select Committee

“I think that we have been hearing much about the system, and there’s no better information, really, that what you can get with hands-on information. So we want to see what we have been talking about all this while, in order to see what the system is, and probably interact with it; see how it’s done so we can get a full picture of how the passport process in conducted from start to finish.”

Reporter

“Is there any aspect of it which is, in your mind, unclear, based on contradicting testimony you have heard over the series of testimony you have held so far?”

Aldo Salazar

“No part of the actual process is unclear to me; specifically, I’d want to see the data capture part of it – not that it is unclear; but I am still at a loss as to how that image could have gotten in there in such a short space of time; that is really what puzzles me. Not necessarily the system itself, but how that image got in there.”