Victor Agali, a Nigerian-born soccer player for Greek club Levadiakos, has been arrested at Schiphol airport near Amsterdam for carrying two fake passports, Dutch military police said on Monday.
“At passport control, on December 27, he [Agali] was found to be in possession of a fake passport,” gendarmerie spokesman Robert van Kapel said.
Upon further investigation, the 31-year-old striker, in transit at Schiphol on a voyage from Lagos to Athens, turned out to have two sets of fake travel documents, Van Kapel said.
PHOTO: AFP
“In the one, the page with his personal particulars has been modified, in the other it was the visa,” he said.
A panel of judges will decide today whether to extend Agali’s provisional detention, a spokeswoman for the Haarlem district court said.
Agali, who had been returning to Greece after visiting his wife and child in Nigeria, pleads innocence, his lawyer Bob Kaarls told reporters.
“The [first] passport judged problematic by officials was sent to him in this form by post by Nigerian authorities in 2007,” he said.
Dutch authorities said that the Schengen visa contained in the second document, issued by Cyprus, did not meet the requisite standards, Kaarls said.
Agali has played for French teams including Marseille (1996-1997), Toulon (1997-1998) and Nice (2004-2005), as well as Germany’s Schalke 04 (2001-2004).
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