Immigration staff in passport renewal fiasco reprimanded

Penang Immigration Department director Nur Zulfa Ibrahim confirmed that immigration officers implicated in denying an elderly woman her passport renewal due to language have been reprimanded.

They will be reaching out to the affected individual to facilitate a passport renewal said Nur Zulfa.

“We will continue to follow up and learn from this incident,” she said, reported China Press.

She revealed that the matter is still under investigation, and based on current understanding, it seems to be a result of a misunderstanding.

However, Nur Zulfa claimed that the authorities do have the right to reject passport applications or renewals for suspects, seeing as there are cases of undocumented workers attempting to renew or apply for passports with fake identity documents.

She claimed that following the incident, she instructed her subordinates to exercise greater caution in carrying out their tasks to prevent any further disputes.

On 21 April, an elderly woman along with her son went to the Immigration Department in UTC Komtar, Penang to have her passport renewed.

However her passport was not renewed due to her lack of fluency in Malay.

Media reports indicated, that the son of the elderly person stated that he had accompanied his mother to UTC Komtar in Penang last Monday, where she successfully complete the procedure for renewing her passport.