52-year-old Singaporean Amran Abdul Sattar pleaded guilty to 8 charges under the Immigration Act and was sentenced to 22 weeks imprisonment on 20 April, according to The Straits Times.
He had moved to Indonesia to start a new life and overstayed there, before assuming a different identity and got himself 2 Indonesian passports, using them to travel to Singapore several times from 2007 to 2016.
He had last used his own Singapore passport back on 28 December 2004 when he left Singapore for Indonesia to work as a translator, staying there for about 2 months before realising that he had overstayed in the country.
However, he didn’t go to the authorities for help because he was afraid of being arrested for overstaying in Indonesia, and on top of that, he had also lost his Singapore passport as well.
Amran then asked a friend to help him out and get an Indonesian identity card under the name of “Indra Shahdan” so that he could continue staying in Indonesia without any consequences.
He paid 5 million rupiahs for the passport in 2007, with the passport bearing his own photo but had the particulars of “Indra Shahdan”.
It was not revealed if this “Indra Shahdan” is real or if he actually exists, and about Amran’s friend and how he managed to get the passport and identity card.
Amran use the Indonesian passport that he had bought to travel in and out of Singapore in 2007 and 2008, before forking out 350,000 rupiahs in 2016 to buy a second Indonesian passport that had his own photo but bearing the particulars of this “Indra Shahdan”.
He claimed that he had the necessary documents to apply for an Indonesian passport because he had gotten married to an Indonesian woman in June 2008, with the documents including a marriage certificate and an Indonesian identity card.
Amran used his second Indonesian passport on 16 February 2016 and showed it to an immigration officer at the Singapore Cruise Centre.
He claimed to be Indra on his disembarkation form and that he had never used a passport under a different name to enter Singapore and the immigration officer then unsuspectingly granted him a 30-day visit pass.
Later that year, he went on to commit similar offences at the Singapore Cruise Centre.
It was not made known how his crimes were found out, but he was eventually arrested at a Chai Chee flat near Bedok North on 15 March last month by officers from the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority.