April 19, 2019
An Iranian couple has been caught trying to enter Argentina with forged Israeli passports, the Argentine dailies La Nacion and Clarin have both reported. Given the widely-held belief that Iran was behind two huge bombings in Buenos Aires in the 1990s, the arrests have drawn far more attention than passport forgery would normally get.
The two Iranian nationals were arrested March 16. The man, aged 27, identified himself as Sajjad Naserani and claimed he was a photographer. The woman, 31, presented herself as Mahsoreh Sabzali and said she was an engineer and an architect.
The forgeries are blatantly amateurish, with many obvious typos in Hebrew. That sparked some to argue the forgeries weren’t unlikely to have been done by Iranian intelligence.
Police cordoned off a 40-block area as they searched for the suspects, indicating the fear that they had brought bombs into the country. They were found and arrested, but without any bombs.
The suspects told investigators they traveled from Iran to Spain, where they likely obtained their forged Israeli passports. Using the documents, the couple flew to Argentina.
Interpol confirmed that the passports used by the Iranians were fake, according to Clarin, which reported that Israel confirmed the passport numbers belonged to two Israelis of French descent.
A similar incident took place a few days before last year’s G-20 summit in Argentina, when two Iranian men were arrested after they entered the country via Bolivia using forged passports. They were found with a small weapons arsenal, Arabic-language credentials and the image of a Hezbollah flag.
But Argentina has not reported such incriminating materials were found on the Iranian couple arrested last month.