In an amazing story of passport identity theft, David Garrett, a New Zealand politician and a barrister, before entering parliament in 2008, admitted to first applying for a birth certificate in a dead child’s name and then using that birth certificate to obtain a passport in that child’s name.
Garrett claims to have read the 1971 book ‘Day of the Jackal’ in which a character in the book does just that. Garrett says it was a “harmless prank” and says he was “curious to see if such a thing could be done”. He now says that he is sorry for his “thoughtless actions” that have caused pain to the family of the deceased boy. Garrett says the passport expired many years ago and that he “never used the passport for any purpose”. This passport fraud was found out because the New Zealand authorities were looking into passport identity theft used by two Israelis thought to be Mossad agents.
Watch the video below of Garrett explaining himself to parliament.
ACT party discussing his act of Passport Identity Theft.
For more details on this interesting story visit:
PM: Garret’s use of baby’s Identity ‘bizarre’ story from New Zealand Herald
David Garrett Resigns as Act Party MP story from New Zealand Herald
NZealand MP admits ‘Day of the Jackal’ passport scam story from Yahoo News Asia