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Authorities in Barbados, a small Caribbean island nation, have recently arrested a Syrian national who tried to board a flight to Germany using a poorly faked Israeli passport.
Border security did not struggle to spot the counterfeit, owing in large part to a myriad of errors scattered throughout the forged document, mainly the bungled spelling of the man's name in Hebrew which completely threw the language's spelling conventions out of the window.
The botched document is riddled with discrepancies between its English and Hebrew sections. While the man is identified as "Hormuz Assulin" in English, the Hebrew spelling of his name is complete gibberish.
The passport also lists Israel as the man's place of birth in English, whereas in Hebrew, it states he was born in Greece.
The fake passport also had a border control stamp on it from Ben Gurion Airport which has been out of use for years.
The Population and Immigration Authority (PIA), which was notified of the forged passport by Barbados authorities, humorously labeled the document a "candidate for the worst forgery of all time.”
The PIA said that the fake immediately aroused the suspicion of Barbados authorities, who also found a Syrian passport in the belongings of the Germany-bound passenger.
“The key to cracking such cases is good working ties between different states around the world. Every case like this one that is brought to us teaches us how sought after the Israeli passport is around the world," a PIA official told Ynet.
The PIA has received multiple reports from various countries in recent years about forged Israeli passports found in the possession of foreign passengers at airports in the Netherlands, Canada, and Ecuador among other places.
Many of the counterfeiters are Iranian nationals trying to use an Israeli passport to fly around the world. This is one of the first instances in which a Syrian national has been caught with a fake Israeli passport.