How did a B.C. gangster get a passport in a fake name? Ottawa won't say

A year after former B.C. gangster Jimi Sandhu was shot to death in Thailand, no details have been released by any Canadian agency about how the 32-year-old obtained a legitimate passport with his photo beside a fake name.

Someone submitted a mail-in application for the passport in 2020 and it was issued out of Saskatoon on Jan. 28, 2021 — five years after the United Nations gangster was deported from Canada to his native India for serious criminality.

Sandhu used the passport to enter Thailand just eight days before his Feb. 4, 2022, assassination, allegedly by two Canadian hit men.

Royal Thai Police investigators found the passport along with cash and drugs in the luxury beachfront villa Sandhu was renting on the tourist island of Phuket.

Police Maj.-Gen. Khemmarin Hassiri confirmed to Postmedia that the passport was a mail-in application.

But Canadian officials have refused to comment specifically on how a convicted criminal thrown out of the country could get his hands on such a valuable commodity.

Sources told Postmedia that Sandhu used Canadian associates to apply for the passport. Once it was issued, one of those associates flew to Southeast Asia to deliver it to the UN gangster.

RCMP Cpl. Christy Veenstra said she couldn’t comment on whether there was even an investigation into the fraudulent Sandhu passport.

“As far as the passport investigation goes, at this time we can only say the RCMP generally does not confirm or deny if an investigation is underway unless criminal charges are laid. We therefore cannot provide further information on this matter,” she said in an email.

The federal Employment and Social Development department provided statistics to Postmedia on the number of mail-in applications per fiscal year from 2017 until now. The highest number of applications came in 2017-2018 with more than 1.7 million. The year Sandhu applied for his, that number had fallen to just 127,829 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government agency could not provide a breakdown for each province, saying that “passport processing is treated as a national workload.”

Asked about other cases like Sandhu’s, media relations officer Maja Stefanovska did not directly response, but said: “the Canadian passport is, and will remain, one of the most secure travel documents in the world.”

Applications are compared to databases “and the results are analyzed,” she said.

“We can’t share what is in those databases nor how those checks are performed. If analysis shows that all requirements are met, the application is considered `entitled’ and sent to the next step.”

An application then proceeds to second level security checks before it’s “deemed cleared for printing.” “The passport is then printed, quality assurance of the printed passport is performed, the passport information is reviewed against the system to ensure that the information in the book is accurate,” Stefanovska said.

“Furthermore, the passport chip is tested and if all verifications are successful, the passport is deemed ready for delivery.”

None of that explains how Sandhu was able to manipulate the system.

But his application was processed at a time when government services were hit with staff shortages due to the pandemic.

In its 2020-2021 annual report, the federal Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship department noted the staffing shortages and closures of passport offices.

“Applications by mail continued to be received, but with processing locations closed or at limited capacity, there were delays in processing applications received at the beginning of the pandemic,” the report said. “With waves of lock downs occurring across the globe, offices abroad were also closed at times or offered limited services, inevitably reducing processing capacity.”

Data provided by the Canada Border Services Agency under the access to information act showed that between 2015 and the end of 2020, just 12 cases were found of people attempting to enter the country with counterfeit Canadian passports. Most of those were in 2019 and 2020 with seven and four incidents in each of those years.

Sandhu is not the first gangster with links to B.C. to get a fraudulent passport.

Wolf Pack gangster Rabih Alkhalil and his brother Nabil, who grew up on the Lower Mainland, got their hands on fake passports out of Ontario in 2014, allowing them to flee from Canada. Rabih was later arrested in Greece, though he escaped from a B.C. jail last summer in the middle of his murder trial. Nabil was shot to death in Mexico in 2018.

The Wolf Pack is suspected of hiring the alleged hit men who flew to Phuket to kill Sandhu. Ex-soldiers Matthew Dupre and Gene Lahrkamp were charged with first-degree murder. Lahrkamp later died in an Ontario plane crash. Dupre is fighting his extradition to Thailand. A third Canadian alleged to be involved in the plot has not been charged.

Supt. Duncan Pound, of B.C.’s Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, said his agency was not involved in any probe of the Sandhu passport.

But CFSEU continues to investigate the larger conspiracy that led to the Sandhu assassination.

“We had an investigation here to see if we could gather evidence with respect to the conspiracy. And then obviously, that sort of made us the natural lead in terms of providing the Canadian support to the extradition request from the Thai police,” Pound said this week.

As for B.C. gangsters getting fake passports, he said: “Gang violence is not just a B.C. problem, or just a Canada problem.”

“Gangsters need to find ways to travel internationally. And an obvious challenge they face is being able to travel on a name other than their own. We would acknowledge that organized crime groups try and find ways to travel and escape the attention of law enforcement.”

kbolan@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/kbolan