The police said yesterday that there had been no serious irregularities in the passport of Hachem Ali, a Syrian who was due to stand trial by jury but who had escaped from Malta. The passport was not false, and the only irregularity was that it had not been stamped by the Immigration authorities to show that the person had entered Malta legally – a purely administrative irregularity.

A biometrics system of verifying an identity with a document that is handed over is being considered in Malta, but not all countries were intending to introduce the system.

The police added that as soon as the provisional arrest warrant was issued on 18 March, 2001, the information was passed on to the Immigration authorities, who introduced it into the control system used in the ports. But the identity that Hachem Ali was using, that of Ali Kanaan, did not appear on the system as being of someone who could not leave the country.