Gardai have raided a business premises in Cork city and seized dozens of documents as part of a joint investigation with the RUC in Belfast into a passports-for-sale operation.
It is understood the fraudsters were forging documents such as birth certificates and using them to apply for British passports and other identification papers. They were charging between £10,000 and £20,000 per passport.
Two men leased an office in Douglas Street on Cork's southside which they used as a headquarters for the operation, using it to keep records and store data on computer files, a Garda source revealed.
They operated in Cork for about four to five months earlier this year, coming down from Belfast for days at a time to work on the documentation for individual passport deals. Gardai were aware of the operation and had been monitoring it.
Detectives from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation in Cork and the National Bureau of Serious Crime in Dublin raided the unoccupied premises in Douglas Street on Saturday under a search warrant.
