The two Africans presented themselves to officers at a police station in the commune of Angoulême in south-west France last week, claiming that they were 16-years-old in order to take advantage of measures aimed at helping underage asylum seekers Charente Libre reported.
One of the African migrants, claiming to be from Mali, was in fact 21 years old, while the other man, who presented a birth certificate from Guinea, was revealed to be 47 years old. His fingerprints were linked to a passport he had used to enter Spain.
The department of Charente, where Angoulême is located, has seen a surge in asylum claims from alleged “minors”. The surge in fake underage migrants was underscored last year when police in Montpellier busted a network of forgers from the Ivory Coast. The forgers were specifically helping adult migrants claim asylum as minors.
Prosecutor in Montpellier, Christophe Barret, said similar fake claims were presented in Angoulême. “Recently, an isolated minor supported by the county council of Hérault said he was 17 years old. The department had doubts. Extensive verifications have formally confirmed that he was 32 years old, in fact.”
The forgery network, based in Montpellier and involving migrants across the country, had been busted defrauding the French government, according to regional daily Metropolitain . The leader of the gang of forgers had been working with human traffickers to help migrants get to Europe through Libya.
French authorities in the department of the Hérault alerted the police when they noticed five migrants from the Ivory Coast having nearly identical documents which showed them all coming from the same province in the African nation.
This led to authorities in the Ivory Coast arresting an African civil servant who had been working with the forgers in helping the human traffickers bring Africans to the EU.
So-called African “orphans” were also exposed as fakes after police examined their mobile phones. “In fact, when we seized their mobile phones, we realised that they regularly called their parents in Ivory Coast,” police divisional commissioner Laurent Siam noted.
The local government of Hérault has also launched 17 complaints against various migrants, claiming that in total the adult migrants had managed to defraud taxpayers of 900 000 euros of state benefits.
Unaccompanied migrants who claim to be minors have become increasingly common in the wake of the 2015 migrant crisis. In Germany as well as Sweden, many underage migrants have turned out to be adults after medical tests.
In the German city of Hamburg, almost half of the underage migrants – 49 percent – were shown to be adults in 2017. The German national average was 43 percent.
The Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) revealed in 2017 that 1 215, or 86 per cent, of asylum seekers tested were in fact adults.
