Confusion mounts over Syrian passport found at Paris attack site

Confusion over a Syrian passport found near
the body of one of the six suicide bombers
who blew themselves up in Paris last week
mounted after investigators on Tuesday said
there are indications the travel document
actually belongs to a Syrian regime soldier.
Far-right political groups across Europe and
the governors of several U.S. states have
presented the discovery of the passport as
an argument against resettling more of the
refugees currently streaming out of conflict
zones in Syria, as well as other parts of the
Middle East and Africa.
News agency Agence France-Presse quoted a
source close to the French investigation as
saying the passport — in the name of Ahmad
al-Mohammad, born in the Syrian city of Idlib
on Sept. 10, 1990 — may have belonged to a
soldier loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-
Assad, whose forces are battling the Islamic
State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and
several other armed groups.

ISIL claimed responsibility for a string of
coordinated attacks on Friday that left 129
people dead and hundreds of others injured in
the French capital.
The source, who spoke on condition of
anonymity, said the passport was either
stolen by ISIL or fabricated based on a real
identity.
Separately, Serbian newspaper Blic reported
Monday that police in Serbia had detained a
refugee holding a Syrian passport with the
same data as the one authorities found at
the scene of the Paris attack.
“A document with the same name and same
data but with the photograph of another man
was found on Saturday on another migrant in
the [reception] center in Presevo (a town in
Serbia’s far south) and that person was held
for questioning,” Blic reported, without citing
a source.
Greek and Serbian authorities have confirmed
that the passport found outside the Stade de
France soccer stadium — where the three
suicide bombers struck — had been issued to
a man who registered as a refugee in October
on the Greek island of Leros, and applied for
asylum in Serbia a few days later.
Earlier Monday, the French prosecutor's
office had said that the passport “remains to
be verified,” but that the fingerprints of the
dead attacker matched those taken in Greece
in October.
Serbian officials said that they believe both
passports — the one found on the bomber
and the one held by a detained refugee —
were fake, and that authorities are working
with French authorities to determine where
the documents originated, U.K. newspaper
The Guardian reported .
Initial reports indicating the passport
belonged to one of the suicide bombers
prompted several far-right political groups
across Europe to use the discovery as an
argument against welcoming refugees and
other migrants into Europe, which is facing
its worst refugees crisis since World War II.
An estimated 500,000 refugees — more than
half of them women and children — have
arrived in Europe this year, according to the
International Organization for Migration.
France's anti-immigration National Front
leader Marine Le Pen called for an
“immediate halt” to new arrivals, and
Germany's PEGIDA movement drew
thousands to its latest anti-Islam rally. But
Germany's government said ISIL may have
intentionally sought to create tensions by
using the passport “to politicize … the refugee
question.”
Several U.S. governors have also expressed
doubts about letting Syrian refugees into their
states under the federal government’s
refugee resettlement program. Some of the
governors said they want to suspend refugee
intake until the security process for vetting
them is reviewed, but it remains unclear
whether states have the legal authority to
decide which refugees are resettled.