By Prasun Sonwalkar,

London, March 21 (IANS) The British government has for the first time admitted that as many as 10,000 passports were issued based on false information last year, including to two people convicted of terror attacks.

The Home Office revealed the figures while announcing new procedures for those applying for their first British passports. Such individuals will now need to attend an interview during which they would be probed from a bank of nearly 200 questions.

The figure of 10,000 wrongly issued passports has come as yet another embarrassment to the Labour government that has recently galvanised its immigration system and put in place new rules. Many of the new rules have been criticised by skilled immigrants - including a large number of Indians - and have been the subject of much litigation.

The two terror convicts, who were wrongly issued British passports, were Dhiren Barot, a person of Indian origin who converted to Islam and is reported to be a senior Al Qaeda terrorist, and Moroccan national Salaheddine Benyaich, who is currently in a Moroccan jail for terrorist offences.

The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) said that Barot and Benyaich received two passports each. Benyaich had two British passports in the name of a British citizen born in Brighton.

Home Office Minister Joan Ryan said the IPS had 16,500 fraudulent applications during the 12-month period to September 2006 - 10,000 of which went undetected.

In a written ministerial statement, she said "almost half" the applications were stopped by existing safeguards, but the remainder had gone undetected.

She said: "Our current estimate is, therefore, that the level of undetected fraud is about 0.5 percent, equivalent to 10,000 applications against the planned 6.6 million passports issued per year.

"Although precise figures are difficult to obtain, it appears that the level of attempted fraud is increasing and getting more sophisticated. Analysis of the frauds shows that the main fraud threat is from first-time adult applications, followed by first-time child applications."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesperson said: "It isn't just a matter of saying there's 10,000 (fraudulently obtained passports) out there and doing nothing about them. Each and every one of these is being followed up to ensure that those responsible are caught."

The shadow home secretary, David Davis, described it as a "shocking admission" that betrayed "chaos at the heart of the passport system".

He said: "This is the latest in a long line of shambles afflicting the passport service. Given this dire record, they have no chance of running the ID card project, which will cost up to 20 billion pounds and involve billions of pieces of data, effectively," he said.

IPS executive director Bernard Herdan said Tuesday that during interviews, applicants would be expected to know answers from a pool of around 200 questions about their ancestry, financial history and previous addresses.

Speaking of Barot, Herdan said: "He had two passports in fraudulent identities which would have been stopped if he had been interviewed."

Recently two Indian nationals were apprehended at the Birmingham airport while trying to board flights on the Birmingham-Toronto sector using false British passports.