Lawyer Jason Azzopardi has said he is convinced that, not only were new identity cards issued to foreign residents on false certificates, but that existing ID cards of Maltese people were duplicated and given to foreign individuals.
On Tuesday a Magistrate had upheld a request made by Azzopardi for a magisterial inquiry into an alleged Identità racket involving the distribution of 18,000 false identity cards.
Posting on Facebook on Wednesday, Azzopardi said that the day before a grandmother had called him up crying. Someone from Mater Dei Hospital had called her daughter (who is the mother of a 15-year-old) about an urgent appointment for the 15-year-old in connection with a very serious illness, Azzopardi wrote.
"Thankfully," he said, "this girl is very healthy and has never needed to go to the hospital."
"I told her to tell the mother of the 15-year-old to call me up. She called me and told me what happened. When they called her from Mater Dei Hospital, she told them that there is a mistake, as her daughter had not made a request for an appointment. They asked her: 'Who is your referring doctor?' She told them, starting to panic, that neither she nor her daughter had gone to any doctor and so there must have been a mistake."
"They told her: 'It cannot be we have a mistake as these are your daughter's details etc.' She froze. She told them: 'That is the number of my daughter's ID card and that is our home address!'"
They told her that it cannot be there was a mistake as her daughter had been coming and going to hospital for four and a half years, and read out the date of each appointment she was meant to have in the previous four years, as results from the computer system at Mater Dei, Azzopardi said.
He said that the mother realised that someone had literally stolen her daughter's ID card number, "as her 15-year-old daughter had never gone to Mater Dei in the previous five years."
Azzopardi said that the "corrupt at Identity Malta had given the same identity card number of this girl to someone foreign who for four years has been coming and going to Mater Dei pretending to be this Maltese girl."
"This is not an administrative mistake, this is corruption. They also stole our ID cards," Azzopardi alleged. "God only knows the thousands passed through bribery."
"Are you seeing why we have overpopulation? Are you seeing why there are queues at Mater Dei?:"
He urged anyone with a similar experience to speak up.