I think the bigger danger with these documents is not what happens at the border coming into Europe but rather within Europe itself. It's easy enough to enter Europe with a real and valid passport and then switch identities to fake documents once there. The only real value at the border would be those who could not get into Europe any other way, and that's the rare bird like those footballers.

A day after Dubai police announced the names of the suspects, a spokesman for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said: "We are unable to identify any of those three individuals as being genuine Irish citizens. Ireland has issued no passports in those names."

The passport numbers had the wrong number of digits and did not contain letters as authentic passports do, he added.

"These purported passports are false. These are not genuine passports."

The problem with all identity documents is that at some point they go back to human judgment and a root document (used just once).

In the UK the root document is your Birth Certificate.

If you have a Birth Certificate all you will find is it is a numberd recipt for your entry into the UK Register of Births. And it also contains a hand written copy of your record details (full name of you your parents and parents occupations etc).

If you like the certificate number is the "Primary Key" to your record in the UK birth DB ("hatches").

If you get married in the UK then you end up with a Marriage Certificate with a different number as a primary key to a record in a different UK marraige DB ("matches")

And when you die your relatives get a Death Certificate which points to yet another UK death DB ("dispatches").

The system behind these different Register's is quite badly flawed (although we are slowly sorting it out). But the simple fact is getting hold of copies of any one of these certificates is not that difficult and by carefull manipulation of the system you can get a nice new shiny (it you pay the pound to have it laminated) Birth Certificate.

The Birth Certificate then unlocks to you first UK passport, that unlocks to a drivers licence both of which get you a bank account etc etc.

So as pointed out in the book "Day of the Jackel" if you know of somebody who has died before 18 years etc you can get a Birth Certificate for them (a flaw that has supposadly been closed but various news articles sugest not).

Likewise if you know somebody from school who emigrated to another Country etc etc you can get a birth certificate for them and go get a passport etc etc.

But it gets better. If you are born in N.I. You are entitled to have a UK and an Irish passport and thus have two passports neither of which are required to be in the same name due to Deed Poll (where you legaly change your name).

At one point in time due to the behaviour of other countries (one of which was Israel) you could apply to get a second valid UK passport.

Now the thing is what happens when your passport is due to expire or has expired?

Well you get two photos (in the new "no fun" format) a form from the Post office and your old passport.

You can either send it all off in the post and cross your fingers. Or if you wish you can visit a passport office to submit the documents and get your nice new shinny passport.

So after your initial passport has been issued the only link down the passports is the old passport and human judgment that the face in one photo is the same as another ten or more years older...

Now if you happen to be Jewish and emigrate to Israel they used to encorage you to hand over a life history and your passport to get a nice new shinny citicenship document and passport.

Have you ever considered what happened to those tens of thousands of valid passports handed in?

What is the chance that you could find a sufficiently good match between a "UK Passport Photo" and a person working for the Government of Israel in Counter Terorism?

I would say very high (think Birthday Paradox).

All the person has to do is fly into the UK with the old passport fill out and notorise a deed poll form, get two photos and a passport form and in 48hours leave the UK with a brand new shinny and fully legitimate UK passport in a new name...

Now Germany used to have "land laws" that enabled you to claim German Citizenship if you could show you had German ancestry.

And as you may know from history lessons a large number of Jews left Germany in the 1930's and got UK and US and many other nations passports often in different names (it appears that deep poll is not registered in the same way as births etc thus opening up another hole).

So it is possible to turn up and get a German passport with very little documentry evidence...

So you could if you did it right have legitimate UK, Irish & German passports each in a different name whilst being a fully paid up citizen of Israel working on Counter Terrorism...

So the various EU passport systems have more holes than a (Non European) Swiss cheese right from the geographic heart of Europe...

So the question arrises why did some of these people have "fake passports" for people that had been on holiday to Israel?

Could it be that passports are so easy to fake that it is not worth the cost or bother to get "real passports" in different names?

Or did the people concerned know from experiance which fake passports would work and thus have "burn ID's" to spare for just such emergancy operations?

I'm assuming it was an emergancy simply because there had been other attempts on the mans life before and he always traveled with body guards, but for some reason (as yet unexplained) his body guards could not get on the flight or subsiquent flights to Dubi.

Which gives rise to a whole host of other questions not least of which is, what was so important in Dubi that he would risk his life getting and staying there?

Oh and just to make it more fun if the parents plan a little ahead it is possible to get a new born baby birth certificates in atleast three countries just by haveing an unattended home birth...

It looks like the Brits have come out of the closet and blamed the Israeli intel agencies:

"GIVEN that this was a very sophisticated operation in which high-quality forgeries were made, the Government judges it highly likely that the forgeries were made by a state intelligence service.” So said David Miliband, Britain’s foreign secretary, on Tuesday March 23rd, explaining to Parliament why he had decided to eject an Israeli diplomat—thought to be a member of Mossad, the Israeli external intelligence service—from the country.

Can anyone recommend a good passport dealer?