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UPDATE: 07/31/08 Arrest Made

British police say they’ve arrested a delivery man over the theft of thousands of blank British passports and visa stickers.

Greater Manchester Police say the 48-year-old man is being held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit robbery. It follows a raid on Monday on a delivery van carrying 3,000 blank documents bound for British embassies overseas.

Officers say the suspect was traveling in the van with the driver. Police claim the theft took place as the driver stopped at a store to buy chocolate.

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Thousands of stolen passports worth millions of pounds could be used for fraudulent or terrorist activity, experts warned yesterday. The Foreign Office admitted a serious breach of security when a van carrying the blank passports was hijacked outside a shop in Oldham, Greater Manchester, on Monday morning. A spokesman confirmed that 24 parcels containing blank passports and vignettes, used for visa inserts, were taken from a van travelling from a printers in Oldham to RAF Northolt, north-west London.

It is thought the consignment contained around 3,000 biometric passports destined for British embassies around the world. The documents are worth £2.5m on the black market, according to police.

The passports were stolen when the driver of the vehicle stopped to buy a newspaper, police said. The thief attacked a second man in the van, before driving a short distance, parking the van and making off with the passports.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said the passports contained no personal details and added that it would be a “highly complex task” to personalise the documents. “The FCO and Identity and Passport Service (IPS) have launched a targeted information campaign directed at organisations that could be presented with one of these stolen documents either for identification or travel purposes.”

He said the serial numbers of the stolen passports would be entered into the IPS system so that anyone attempting to travel with the document would be stopped at any airport passport control.

The stolen passports contain a chip replicating the data printed on the document. An IPS spokesman said: “Our hi-tech security features mean that these passports are unusable.”

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