CAIRO: The German Embassy in Cairo has issued a statement regarding the recent scandal concerning the issuance of visas based on forged documents in which they characterized the wrongdoings by some of their employees as attempts to fast-track the process for certain individuals. Magdy Al-Sayed from the press office of the German Embassy in Cairo read a prepared statement to Daily News Egypt, which said that an Egyptian citizen had filed a complaint that some visas were being fast-tracked as opposed to others. "The initial aim of these actions was to circumvent the allotted time frames for visa applications and the embassy immediately responded by preventing this from happening. The embassy workers in question are no longer employed by the embassy, Al-Sayed read from the statement. The embassy statement disputes the statement of the German Foreign Ministry, which highlighted that visas were issued based on forged documents. However the foreign ministry statement had referred to both the embassies in Cairo and Moscow, which involved a bigger number of cases. However, the Foreign Ministry statement did specifically state that six Egyptian employees at the German Embassy in Cairo were suspected of having submitted forged documents to acquire visas for people wanting to travel to Germany. The press office refused to comment further on the issue indicating that they could only read the prepared statement and not add anything else. A German Foreign Ministry spokesman told AP on condition of anonymity that the disparities were discovered on a regular inspection of embassy operations, confirming what was to emerge in a Der Spegiel report. German police and security experts were sent to the respective embassies. In the Moscow embassy, the visa irregularities were on a much larger scale, with a suspicion that 1,259 applicants offered forged documents as opposed to 132 discovered so far in Cairo.
