The Immigration Department has flagged the passport of 64-year-old American Tony Alan Puglisi. That's because there are questions about his place of
birth. Immigration Minister Godwin Hulse told us that his Belizean passport says he was born in Italy, but the US Embassy has indicated that he was
actually born in the state of Virginia. Hulse says because of this, the Department of Immigration has put out a notice at all its ports of entry that
Puglisi is a person of interest wanted for further questioning about that discrepancy. He left the country on January 9th, 2015 after getting his new
Belizean passport a week earlier.
But, there's a little more to the story. Turns out that Puglisi had a Belizean passport issued in 2005 - which, Hulse explains was under the old
handwritten system – meaning it was not a machine-readable passport. He says because of this there is no record of it – yet nonetheless, Puglisi was
given a new machine readable passport based on the strength of that 2005 document alone.
Hulse told us that's problematic in itself because of the 200 passports that were stolen from that office in August of 2005. He said the department is
quote, "trying to make sure the 2005 passport is not one of those ones."
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