Bayu Marhaenjati – The court heard on Monday how high-profile terror suspect Umar Patek was able to walk into an immigration office with his wanted poster on the wall and obtain a passport using a fake ID.

Patek, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali bombings, and his wife obtained passports from the immigration office in East Jakarta that they used to flee to Pakistan. The pair used fraudulent IDs to obtain the documents. Patek used the name Anis Alawi, and his wife, Ruqayyah Husein Luceno, had the name Fatimah Zahra.

Immigration officials told the West Jakarta District Court that they failed to check whether the couple's ID cards were fake. They also acknowledged that they failed to recognize Patek when he came to the office as the man whose picture was displayed on wanted posters there. "We saw no problems with the documents so we did not check any further," said Asni Redhani Suandi, an immigration official.

A Central Jakarta Population Agency official, Kamtawi, and a Koja subdistrict official, Dedi Hermawan, testified last week that the ID cards and birth certificates used by Patek and Ruqayyah were forgeries.

Asni also told the court that pictures of Patek were on the wall of the interview room at the immigration office, but because the terror suspect used a different name, no alarm bells rang. He said that at the time of the interview, in 2009, Patek's name was on a list of people banned from leaving the country.

"We have an online system that records all fugitives... but the travel ban list only includes names, not pictures. So, when we ran the name on our computer, he came out clean," Asni said.

A judge asked whether this meant that all fugitives using fake names could flee the country. "Yes, they can," Asni replied. "Because we only check names, not pictures."