BBC Monitoring Service - United Kingdom

Full text of the report by Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter
The Swedish embassies in Sofia and Tunis made smuggling trips possible. They processed visas for smugglers and their passengers.

It was the Bulgarian border police who sounded the alarm when they saw how group after group of Turkish men crossed the border with a visa from the Swedish embassy in Sofia. The border police asked for a meeting with the ambassador where the issue was discussed and the ambassador then got in touch with the Norwegian police.

The smugglers said they represented a travel agency, Guldemir Sport, which specializes in sports travel. `They said they had a group of athletes who has trained in Bulgaria. They wanted to travel to Norway to participate in various events: marathons and ski races. Since they were on the way to Norway, it would have been a great inconvenience for them to travel back to Turkey to apply for visas there,` said Lennart Holst, deputy charge d`affairs at the embassy in Sofia. `Those who were responsible for such things gave them the visas. It was a hasty decision, quite simply. Later it just became routine because no-one protested. Over time, they got to be old acquaintances,` said Holst.

The primary rule is that whoever applies for a visa should do it in his homeland. But each embassy has the possibility to take a decision itself based on the situation in each case.

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