Refugee passport find at Paris carnage spot 'fake'

A man has been detained in Serbia after he was found carrying a Syrian passport matching the same details as one found near the body of one of the Paris suicide bombers.

The document also carried the details of 25-year-old Almohammad Ahmad but with a different photograph to the one found on Friday.

It raises already serious concerns that the passport used to identify one of the attackers as a “refugee terrorist” was faked.

Whether the man who blew himself up outside the Stade de France did indeed travel through Greece and Macedonia, as the passport suggests, remains unclear.

Greek authorities have said they took the passport-holder's fingerprints and photo when he was registered there on the 3 October, and it is now up to the French authorities to match them to one of the attackers' bodies.

But according to the Serbian daily Blic, the existence of the second passport with the same data means “it is likely that the two men separately purchased false Syrian passports at the same forger in Turkey”.

The name itself, Almohammad Ahmad, is unknown to the French anti-terror authorities, and officials have been careful not to draw conclusions from the passport found at the bomb site in Paris.

Media outlets, however, have drawn attention to the fact that one of the bombers may have entered Europe on a refugee boat, and the far-right leader Marine le Pen has called on France to stop its refugee intake with immediate effect.

On Sunday, the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker urged political leaders not to be put off the programme already agreed for taking in more of those genuinely fleeing conflict.

Those who attacked Paris were “criminals”, Juncker said at the G20 summit in Turkey, “not refugees, not asylum seekers”.

“Those who organised these attacks and those that perpetrated them are exactly those that the refugees are fleeing and not the opposite,” he said.

Meanwhile, Germany's justice minister yesterday warned against drawing a hasty link between refugees and perpetrators of the deadly Paris attacks, warning that the IS group could be trying to exploit the debate over Europe's migrant influx.

But Justice Minister Heiko Maas called for "very, very great prudence, until things are clear".

"We are aware that the IS (Islamic State) is known to leave such false tracks behind to politicise and radicalise the issue over refugees in Europe," Maas told public broadcaster ARD.