Court slashes jail term of NPRA employee convicted of forgery

TDT | Manama

The Supreme Criminal Court of Appeal reduced the jail term previously issued against an employee in the Nationality, Passports and Residence Affairs (NPRA) from three years to one. The man was convicted by a first degree court, which found him guilty of forging information in the NPRA electronic system, after he allowed a person to travel abroad and return to the Kingdom without entering his personal details in the system.

Court files showed that the crime occurred in 2018, in which the appellant, in consensus with the second defendant, did not enter the latter’s information in the NPRA system, allowing him to travel to Saudi Arabia through King Fahad Causeway and re-enter Bahrain through the same way.

The second defendant confessed that his co-defendant, the appellant, did not enter his information in the system because his identity card was expired at the time. The Public Prosecution charged the appellant in January of 2018 for forging information using information technology that belonged to the NPRA in the Interior Ministry.

The prosecution mentioned in its arguments that he, the appellant, refrained from performing the duties imposed on him by his job to enter the data of the second defendant, and it showed in the NPRA system that the latter did not leave the country. The appellant was initially sentenced to three years of imprisonment. He appealed against the verdict and the Supreme Criminal Court of Appeal recently accepted his appeal and ordered to reduce the punishment to one year in jail.