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Farmer poses as dead man to get US immigration visa, fingerprint check gives him away

Amandeep Shukla

New Delhi, December 3: Varinder Singh, a farmer from Hoshiarpur, thought he had hit upon a sure-fire solution to his visa problems when he came across information about a dead man in his village who had two brothers in the US who would help him get citizenship there.

So posing as Shiv Singh, who died in 2004, he decided to apply for an immigration visa to the US embassy in Delhi. What aided his cause was that the deceased’s wife, Prakash Kaur, was willing to help him. So on Thursday, with the help of documents provided to him by Prakash, he turned up at the embassy in Chanakyapuri posing as Shiv Singh.



But what he had forgotten was that the embassy had a record of his fingerprints from an earlier visa application. A background check revealed that the fingerprints did not the match the name under which the application was being filed. A match was found with an application for a non-immigrant visa by Varinder.

When he was confronted with these details, Varinder admitted to embassy officials that he had tried for the visa two years ago but failed to get it. According to police officers at the Chanakyapuri police station, who arrested Varinder on a complaint from Reed Beckmeyer, a US Embassy official, he contacted Prakash through the dead man’s brothers, US citizens Surinder and Bhupinder.

Prakash Kaur, a co-applicant to to the immigration visa, wanted someone to impersonate her dead husband so that she too would get US citizenship, Varinder told police.

Varinder has been charged with impersonation and fraud. “We may send a team to Punjab to ascertain the facts,” said a senior police official.