By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 30 December 2013 :
Prime Minister Ali Zeidan, Deputy PM Al-Gadi and a number of other Ministers visited the . . .[restrict]Passports and Immigration Authority at its Salah Al-Deen headquarters on Sunday, where they reviewed the progress of the new biometric passport.
Speaking exclusively to Libya Herald on the margins of the Algerian Prime Minister’s visit to Tripoli, Deputy PM Abdulsalam Al-Gadi assured that Libya’s new biometric passports will be issued within the next few days.
It will be recalled that Libya’s new biometric passport was first officially revealed by Al-Gadi during a press conference back in February this year. However, it was not until June that the government promised that the new passport will actually be issued at the end of July.
Despite this promise, however, the new passport has failed to materialize, with various unconfirmed rumours of, on the one hand, interested parties scuppering the newly installed system, to reports of the inability of the passports authority personnel to use the new computerized system.
In June, Berlin-based German company, Bundesdruckerei GmbH (the Federal Printers) who are printing the new Libyan biometric passports, had said that the first biometric passport should be issued in the last week of July if all sides “keep to the agreed timelines”. [/restrict]
