By Sidi Mohamed
DOHA: The number of travellers entering and departing the country through Hamad International Airport increased by 14 percent last year due to ongoing construction boom, reflecting positively on the performance of the Airport Passports Department, a senior officer at the airport has said.
Col. Mohammed Rashid Al Mazroui, Director of the department, said: “Earlier, there used to be a peak time of passenger arrival and departure and sometimes it dropped, but now the peak time is all the time.”
Travellers can complete procedures fast which has also helped reduce long queues, which were sometimes because some people obtained visa on arrival, some were yet have their eyes scanned, others had exceeded the duration of stay abroad while some had their passports amended — all of which took a lot of time.
The department is working to cope with the increasing number of travellers by further developing entry and departure procedures. Work is also going on to use smart traveller programme, and provide more training for airport staff, he said, adding 1,077 employees attended training courses last year.
“When any forgery is discovered in the passport or other official documents of a traveller, he is blacklisted and sent back to the country he has come from,” Col. Al Mazroui (pictured) told Police with you, a magazine issued by the Public Relations Department at the Ministry of Interior.
He said in such cases, if a traveller is leaving Qatar, he is referred to the concerned authorities for investigation because the forgery might have happened here. The process of checking travel documents is done through sophisticated devices such as travel documents reader and fraud revealer that can discover many types of forgery.
“We have modern devices to check travel documents and discover forgery, for example, VSC 40, in addition to technological devices that can discover the place of forgery in the passport,” he added.
Major Nasser Abdulkarim Al Humaidi, Head of Airport Passports Section, said some 140 eye scanners have been set up at HIA according to the highest international specifications and 3,984,231 visas of all types were issued last year.
The Peninsula
