ISLAMABAD, May 10: The High Commission of the United Kingdom in Islamabad received over 3,400 visa applications with forged documents last year, the commission’s visa service director Alex Pond said on Tuesday.

Talking to reporters here at a ceremony held to hand over forged document detecting equipment to the Immigration and Passport Directorate, Mrs Pond said the commission had received over 170,000 visa applications. During the current year, she said, an increase of 15 per cent was expected in the number of visa applications, which would go up to 200,000.

The UK High Commission’s director said most of the fake documents were submitted by student visa seekers. She said the UK visa policy for Pakistanis had not changed.

Mrs Pond said the UK High Commission had received over 3,400 manual Pakistani passports but there was no compliant about Machine Readable Passports.

She praised the government for introducing the MRPs and said the security features of Pakistani passports were more advanced than those available anywhere in the world.