Man let off lightly after forging visa to see sick dad

A Serbian man admitted to forging a Schengen visa in an attempt to leave Malta to see his "very sick" father without having to answer why he had overstayed.

The court gave electrician Milos Petrovic, 27, a suspended jail sentence instead of the minimum term of six months behind bars that has been established for convictions on forged travel documents.

This is the second time in five days that a magistrate has done so following the case of a Nigerian man found guilty by Magistrate Antonio Micallef Trigona on Friday of having false papers. The Nigerian, Peter Omagadhi, had pleaded with the court not send him to jail.

Mr Petrovic had been granted a visa in 2006. His father fell sick and he decided to forge a Schengen visa to avoid trouble with the immigration office on his way out on Monday, a court heard yesterday. But immigration officers immediately spotted what was described by Police Inspector Nezren Grixti as an obvious forgery.

Mr Petrovic confessed to the officers what he had done and yesterday repeated that guilty plea in court.

Defence lawyer Mark Busuttil told Magistrate Lawrence Quintano that if his client was in fact jailed he would probably never see his father again because he was a "very sick man". The lawyer pointed out that, last Friday, someone facing similar charges was given a suspended jail term.

Inspector Grixti acknowledged this but pointed out that the benchmark was a judgment by the Chief Justice where a minimum of six months imprisonment was handed down for such crimes.

Magistrate Quintano, however, opted to suspend the six-month jail term for 18 months.