London, Nov 8 (ANI): British Home Secretary Theresa May has admitted that the government will never know how many terrorists and criminals entered the country after border checks were secretly axed.
The UK Borders Agency have been accused of a massive cover-up to hide the number of people let in to the country under a secret relaxation of immigration controls this year.
The Home Secretary admitted that she ordered a 'pilot' scheme to water down passport checks in July for Britons and other EU nationals without informing Parliament.
Senior Home Office sources conceded May agreed to extend the pilot scheme in September, without knowing whether it was working properly or not.
According to the Daily Mail, up to five million foreign nationals may have entered the UK during the downgrade, which applied at every port and airport. It will never be known how many were illegals.
A recently disclosed email revealed that UKBA staff were ordered to 'cease routinely opening the chip' in biometric passports from the EU.
Officials were also told to stop 'routinely checking' children from the EU 'against the Warnings Index', which is designed to weed out possible terrorists and criminal gangs.
Extraordinarily, the document said that the downgrade in checks was carried out to 'ensure good order in the arrival hall, disruption to flight schedules' and prevent 'passengers being held on the aircraft'.
The scandal has become a huge embarrassment for the Tories, who campaigned at the election on a platform of reducing immigration to 'tens of thousands' a year, after it soared to more than a quarter of a million under Labour. (ANI)
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