A mystery involving 500 blank Nepali travel documents that disappeared from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2009 has resurfaced after more than a decade, raising fresh questions about weaknesses in Nepal’s document-issuing system and why the original investigation failed to establish where the missing papers went.
The missing documents came to light during an investigation into the alleged misuse of Nepali passports and travel documents. According to The Kathmandu Post, the documents were part of a batch numbered A-026001 to A-026500. Three documents from that batch were later found to have been issued to Tibetan refugees in a separate case that has now reached Kathmandu District Court. The whereabouts of the other 497 documents remain unknown.
The case has been brought back into focus after the Kathmandu District Attorney’s Office filed a case against Foreign Ministry Joint Secretary Pushpa Raj Bhattarai over the alleged illegal issuance of travel documents to five Tibetan refugees in 2009. The documents had reportedly been used by people who were not registered as refugees residing in Nepal. Bhattarai has denied wrongdoing and told investigators that he did not know how the documents were prepared and that his signature may have been misused.
The investigation into the five travel documents began after a German Embassy official raised concerns in 2010. Five Tibetans had arrived at the embassy in Kathmandu seeking visas to join relatives who had received asylum in Germany. Their Nepal-issued travel documents raised questions because the applicants were reportedly linked to refugee settlements in India rather than being registered Tibetan refugees living in Nepal.
That investigation eventually revealed the connection to the larger batch of missing documents. Three of the documents involved in the current case—numbered A-026225, A-026226 and A-026227—belonged to the 500-document batch that had disappeared from the Foreign Ministry’s Store Section in 2009. Investigators have now reopened the question of what happened to the remaining documents and whether they were also misused.
According to information cited by The Kathmandu Post, 250 of the documents were reportedly released for Nepal’s mission in Cairo and another 250 for the mission in Bangkok. However, a subsequent internal check reportedly found that neither mission had actually requested the documents. That discrepancy became one of the most important unanswered questions surrounding the case.
The issue also raises questions about how government documents were being tracked at the time. Officials told investigators that documents released from the Store Section were supposed to be entered into registers before being sent to the dispatch section and eventually forwarded to the relevant missions. Yet investigators were unable to establish what happened to the 500 documents after they left the store.
The missing-document mystery was discovered during an earlier investigation involving allegations that foreign nationals had obtained Nepali passports using forged documents. The Central Investigation Bureau had arrested Bachchuram KC, a non-gazetted official in the Passport Section, in January 2010. Investigators found that KC had allegedly helped foreign nationals obtain Nepali passports using fraudulent documentation.
Investigators also received information suggesting that people in Nepal and India were involved in obtaining Nepali citizenship certificates for foreign nationals. According to the investigation reported by The Kathmandu Post, such certificates could allegedly be obtained for thousands of US dollars and were then used as the basis for acquiring Nepali passports.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations, the original investigation never fully established what happened to the missing travel documents. One police officer involved in the earlier investigation told the newspaper that the documents did not receive the level of scrutiny they should have, while another investigator said it remained a mystery why a complete investigation was never conducted.
The issue has now returned to the attention of the Central Investigation Bureau. CIB chief AIG Uma Prasad Chaturvediconfirmed that a supplementary investigation has begun to determine who may have been involved in the disappearance and possible misuse of the remaining documents. He said the full picture would become clearer only after the investigation is completed.
The case also highlights a broader vulnerability in Nepal’s identity and travel-document systems. Investigators have previously encountered cases in which apparently genuine Nepali passports were obtained using fraudulent citizenship documents. In one earlier case, two people were found travelling on genuine Nepali passports that had reportedly been issued on the basis of citizenship certificates containing false information.
For now, it is important to distinguish between what investigators have established and what remains an allegation or unanswered question. Three documents from the missing batch have been connected to the 2009 case, but there is no established public finding that all 500 were misused. The fate of the other 497 remains part of the supplementary investigation.
More than 17 years after the original documents disappeared, investigators are once again examining the trail. The renewed investigation could determine whether the missing papers were simply lost through administrative failures or whether they were deliberately diverted and used as part of a wider document-fraud network.