In Germany, a large number of Afghan “asylum seekers and refugees” are “on holiday” at home while the left-green-liberal Interior Ministry turns a blind eye.
Here is the article by NTV:
Exclusive research by RTL shows that many asylum seekers and refugees who have been recognized in Germany are flying home to visit their home countries. They had stated that they had fled from there because of danger to their lives and limb. The German authorities seem powerless and the Interior Ministry uninterested.
For many Afghans, Steindamm in the Hamburg district of St. Georg is apparently a gateway to their old homeland, the Hindu Kush: within a radius of just a few hundred meters, there are several travel agencies that organize trips to their old homeland for people from Afghanistan who sought and received protection in Germany. The problem: German authorities are presumably deliberately deceived and therefore know almost nothing about the travel activities. Otherwise, the traveling Afghans could easily have their residence permit in Germany revoked for an unauthorized visit to their homeland.
But how is it possible for a refugee to return home to Afghanistan? Who organizes these trips? Who knows about it? How big is the industry behind it? Who benefits? And why are the German authorities not doing anything about it? The RTL program “Extra” investigated these questions and broadcast the results of months of research on Tuesday evening.
Social media such as TikTok shows that Afghans living in Germany regularly go on holiday to their old homeland and post pictures of their experiences there. So is Afghanistan safer than generally assumed? This is what Afghan refugees report in a research interview with “RTL Extra”. “Many Afghans from Europe are currently returning for holiday. Even people from London, from Germany, are going on holiday,” says one Afghan. And: The Taliban are “nice,” reports a young Afghan woman.
Alleged travel destination Iran
The research at Steindamm in Hamburg shows that these are not isolated cases. Last year, around 400,000 people with Afghan nationality lived in Germany, around 60,000 of whom have the Blue Passport. These special travel documents are issued to “asylum seekers” or “refugees” recognized in Germany as a replacement for the passport from their country of origin. The passports state that their holders do not have the right to travel to the country they fled from. In addition, there are Afghans with German residence permits who travel with their Afghan passport.
According to travel agency operators, hundreds of Afghans travel to their country of origin via Hamburg every week with so-called blue passports. They apparently use these to fly to Afghanistan via Turkey and Iran. “We’ll do it. No problem,” is the answer repeatedly given by various travel agencies when asked.
The travel agencies and the travelers themselves use a trick with the help of the Iranian authorities: so-called “double entry visas” allow a trip to Afghanistan with a stopover in Iran. Iran is given to the German authorities – for example when entering and leaving the country at a German airport – as the actual destination country. The travel route is then, for example, Hamburg, Tehran, Kabul, Tehran, Hamburg.
In order to deceive the German authorities, the visas are not glued into the passports as usual, but are simply placed inside as a loose sheet of paper. The stamps from the border authorities are not stamped in the blue passport, but only on the loose sheet of paper, which can be disposed of in good time before the return trip to Germany. The actual destination country of Afghanistan is thus concealed when re-entering Germany. In most cases, the German authorities do not notice anything.
No idea, no numbers
When asked whether the Federal Ministry of the Interior knows about the home leave, Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser shirks responsibility and explains to RTL: “First of all, it is not our job as the Federal Ministry of the Interior, but rather the job of the local immigration authorities to ensure that something like this does not happen.” However, the issue will be looked into. The ministry also stated in writing to RTL that exact figures are “not recorded statistically”.
The deputy chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group for domestic and legal policy, Thorsten Frei, is outraged by this and sees it as a sign that the Interior Ministry has “no interest whatsoever” in collecting the data, and that it is “clearly not paying any attention at all”.
Heiko Teggatz, chairman of the Federal Police Union, also sharply criticised the Interior Minister: “The Federal Government must now immediately pass a law to include such visas in passports. It is a mystery to me how a visa that is placed in the passport like an information leaflet can even become valid. If you drive to Austria and have to buy a motorway vignette, you have to stick it on the windscreen and not just put it on the dashboard.”
In addition, the federal police offices at the airports do not have enough staff to control departures as well as entry and flight security. “If the Interior Minister claims that the federal police control everything at the airports, then she is very much mistaken. She certainly knows that very well.”