Man with forged passport jailed for six weeks   

A man who attempted to board a flight from Gibraltar to Birmingham with a forged Dutch passport was sentenced to six weeks in custody at the Magistrates’ Court yesterday. 

Yaser Alenezi, 27, a Stateless National, pleaded guilty to being in possession of a forged passport. 

Prosecutor James Lennane described how Alenezi was approached in the departure lounge at Joshua Hassan Gibraltar International Airport after the Border and Coastguard Agency raised concerns over the validity of his passport.  

Alenazi’s Dutch passport was examined visually and technically by RGP officers and the biometric chip was unreadable.  

When officers searched his belongings, they found a Greek asylum passport with a different name and details to those in the forged passport. 

Mr Lennane handed the forged passport over to the Justices of the Peace describing how it was a sophisticated imitation. 

Alenezi said he was travelling to the UK to see his sick uncle and that the passport was given to him by a man in a café in Athens. 

He added that he was not aware that the passport was forged and that he had been “tricked”. 

Alenezi’s lawyer Jeevan Daswani said his client was born in Kuwait and is a member of the Bidoon, a largely stateless Arab minority mostly descended from nomadic tribes known as Bedouin who settled in Kuwait but were not included as citizens at the time of the country’s independence in 1961. 

According to Alenezi, he lived in Kuwait until 2025 when a cousin in Turkey arranged for him to travel to Greece with the hope of obtaining a Greek passport. 

Mr Daswani said his client accepted that he was “reckless and that the passport was not applied for through the proper channels”, adding that he apologised to the court and authorities. 

Alenezi was sentenced to six weeks in custody.  

The Chronicle understands that no deportation order was sought and Alenezi was not charged with being a non-Gibraltarian in Gibraltar without a valid permit as he had a valid Greek asylum passport, which allows him to travel in the Schengen area for 90 days within any 180-day period.