500 documents vanished from the foreign ministry. Nepal never followed the trail
Summary
Five hundred blank travel documents vanished from Nepal’s Foreign Ministry in 2009 and were never traced, exposing gaps in the passport and refugee-document issuance system. A fresh supplementary investigation has now been opened after a chargesheet revived the old case.
Key Points
- A Kathmandu court chargesheet against foreign ministry official Pushpa Raj Bhattarai has revived the long-stalled case involving illegal travel documents issued to Tibetan refugees in 2009.
- Investigators say three of the documents in the case came from a missing batch of 500 travel documents that disappeared from the ministry’s Store Section and were never accounted for.
- The CIB has begun a supplementary investigation into who handled the missing documents and how they were misused.
- The story highlights long-standing weaknesses in Nepal’s passport system, which has repeatedly accepted fraudulent underlying documents without tracing their source.
