I got investigated for a fake passport
How has your holiday been?
It was the 8th of December and I was at Paphos airport in Cyprus. I had gone through security and I just had to go through immigration before I get to the shopping area/departure gates. I travel a lot, and I have been in many different weird situations in immigration. I was investigated once in 2013 when I had arrived in the UK for my undergraduate studies for having 2 “Mohamed”s’ in my name and because years ago I had travelled to Syria. I travel to the UK a lot and it was just funny being stopped at immigration and being questioned.
Anyways, back to the Cyprus story.
I get to the front of the queue and get to the officer in the booth and I already know the procedure
“Can I have your passport?”
“What were you doing in Cyprus?”
Again, I travel a lot, so I know the questions, so I just preemptively hand them my passport + my resident permit issued by the Cypriot government that mentions that I am a student at the medical school. I hand these to the officer and within 20-30 seconds, I start to notice that he is scratching the passport? I get confused, this has never happened before, he starts shining his torch at it and holding it at different angles, you know? like when you suspect something is fake. He then bends the passport and starts looking at it in between the pages at the stitching? I thought, surely this isn’t happening right now and this isn’t real. Am I in an episode of border patrol?
Cypriot culture involves being very loud and this is common knowledge, so the officer starts speaking loudly to his colleague in the booth next to him and starts saying,
“Does this look fake to you?”
Mind you, there is a queue of at least 30-60 people behind me who are hearing this and it is just embarrassing.
He then passes the passport to another officer who hands it to the other officer in the other booth who says “it looks fine to me” but my officer is not satisfied, he starts scraping it again and again. He then asks me when I last travelled and I’m like, literally last week? to the UK and back. Which is why I was so confused. I literally flew the previous week and returned back to Cyprus and this didn’t happen.
Anyways, he then starts to move to my resident permit card and starts scratching that, thinking that, that is fake too? He then opens my photo on his computer screen, and makes it full screen and starts to compare my facial features on the computer to me. He starts pointing at my eyes on the screen and my nose.. I mean I know I gained some weight but gahdamn.
This was all frustrating because there were people behind me who clearly saw what was happening and It’s just embarrassing. This whole thing was around 10 minutes.
The thing that annoyed me though, was how he acted at one point. When he initially called his colleague across in the other booth and told him that this seems like a fake passport (It’s not by the way). The colleague asks what passport is it?
He then replies with this facial expression that I just cannot describe, but I will try my best to. He basically pulled a face that you pull when you look down on something/someone. Like a meh wtf is this type of thing? I don’t know if that makes sense, but take it from me, I know that expression well and I saw him pull it when he answered “It’s a Kenyan passport that says East African community” followed by a ‘wtf is this shit’ expression
The Jimmy Fallon GIF below does not do it any justice.
Anyways, after scratching endlessly and not getting anywhere, he had no choice but to stamp my passport and let me go because, you know, the passport is not fake. We could’ve been there all day and he would’ve found nothing because the PASSPORT IS NOT FAKE.
Travelling with an African passport already is stressful for me. Paperwork on paperwork. Document check on document check. Constantly being questioned about my travel itinerary and my travel intentions and it is all just a long process.
This trip just made its way to the top of the list of horrible airport experiences and I hope I never see that piece of shit officer ever again.