Bangalore: A week ago four Sri Lankans were detained at the Bangalore airport while allegedly trying to take a flight to Europe using forged passports.

More than 16 cases of fake passports have been detected at the airport so far this year. In 2005, 42 cases were registered.

This has made the immigration authorities seek help in the form of sophisticated scanners that can detect forged passports and other travel documents. The scanners can be installed at automated verification counters at the airport and used much like the x-ray machines that examine baggage.

Passport forgery is carried out through crude methods such as manipulating photostat copies of original documents or superimposing photos on stolen passports. No hi-tech machines are used by local forger who may charge anything from Rs. 8, 000 upwards for a fake passport. If passports are required urgently, charges go up.

For the immigration authorities, it is difficult to check the authenticity of a passport as they have to deal with hundreds of them each day corresponding to the steady increase in overseas flights. Often flights closely follow each other and it is not possible for them to closely scrutinise travel documents.

The automated verification equipment now being sought is in use at the international airport in Delhi. In this system, a scanner captures the image of a document and the security features are compared against templates stored in the machine's database.

All details of the image are checked and any tampering can also be detected. This is especially useful if the passport is a stolen one with the photo and a few other details altered.

Hundreds of passports can be verified within a few minutes so that there will be no waiting lines or delays.

On June 16, two persons of Nepalese origin were detained at the Bangalore airport before boarding a flight when they were attempting to pass off fake passports. Statements given by them indicated they had obtained the documents from an agent here. This indicates that Bangalore too has its sources of fake travel documents once more common in bigger cities.

While most persons travelling with forged documents used to be job seekers, lately there have been cases of criminal elements using them in Bangalore also.

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