LEBANESE ARRESTED WITH GHANAIAN PASSPORT (PAGE 22, DEC 15, 2010)

A LEBANESE national, Rabeih Zaidan, 32, who was arrested for illegal possession of a Ghanaian passport has been repatriated to his home country on the orders of an Accra District Magistrate’s Court.
The court gave the order after convicting Zaidan. He pleaded guilty to the charge of illegal possession of a Ghanaian passport.
The convict was apprehended by officials of the Document and Visa Fraud Unit of the Ghana Police Service on November 29, 2010, when he attempted to use the Ghanaian passport to transact business at a shopping mall.
A search on him revealed that he was also in possession of Liberian and Guinean passports bearing his photographs.
He was suspected to have used forged birth certificates, among other documents, to acquire the passports.
Briefing the Daily Graphic, the Director of Public Relations at the Ghana Immigration Service, Mr Francis Palmdeti, said the convict who claimed to have been born to Ghanaian parents indicated that he had been a resident in the country since 1992 after a brief stay in Nigeria.
Suspicious of his nationality, officials of a shopping mall where Zaidan had gone to transact the business, alerted the police who moved in swiftly to arrest him and later handed him over to the Ghana Immigration Service for further investigations.
Zaidan was thus put before court on December 9, 2010, for acquiring a Ghanaian passport illegally.