- Michael M.: Too much going on. Life in flux, etc..
- Sunshine: Wow, I was soooo happy to see a new post in my rss reader. I was hopping this is already the comeback! :(...
- gandalf: Did you only get caffeine through Dr.p or did you drink coffee as well? I’m interested, since...
- neeka: nine kilos… wow… :) happy holidays to you, michael, and to all your loved ones! veronica
- m: It was a bargain. No strings attached.
Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Maribor, Slovenia.
Portoroz, Slovenia.
• AlienMelon
• Burger.si
• Heck
• Izklop
• si.blogs
• Sloblogi
• Blogorola
• Natalija Verboten
The celica hostel is a former prison — but how about staying in a real one? (pic source)
I suppose the title of “worst vacation ever” will always belong to the occasional hiker who ends up dead in the mountains. But still: the BBC’s Kofi Sekyere had a helluva lousy time here too. According to his account, someone must have been telling lies about him, because without him having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning in Ljubljana. The police accused K. of defrauding a German company of 450,000 euros. “It was all so absurd I thought the mix-up would be sorted within hours,” he writes. Needless to say, it wasn’t. And it was his birthday, too.
All things considered, he took it really well. He even posted a picture of himself shaking hands with the arresting officer. You can read the entire story here: ID Theft Left Me in a Slovenian Prison.
(Thanks Camille!)
Comments
Comments for this post are closed.
i wanted to write lots of things about the three times that police have stopped for walking around something that is obviously suspicius but my computer seems to be wanting otherwise: anyway funny story
Lucky man, he could a well end up wearing orange suit under the Carribean sun.
I knew of this, I just never got around to reading the full account. Thanks!
My two eurocents: One often wonders about how much gov’t should know about its cizitens. People from UK and especially US are often surprised by the fact that we are issued so many different IDs in Slovenia (and I imagine it goes for Europe as a whole). There’s your personal ID number, your tax ID number, your passport number, you ID card number, your driver’s licence nubmber, etc, etc…
But there’s almost always used in pairs - thus making it possible to double-check and cross-reffernce your identity.
I realize that it enables plenty of government control, but in this case it would have helped.
This article was sent to me by my sometimes too-nervous mother.This article has now firmly planted the idea in her head that we Ghanaians are being targeted by some elaborate Sloveniana scheme. I’m trying to calm her down, but in viewing and reviewing the article, the one question that keeps jumping up in my mind is: WHY DID THEY CHECK FOR A WARRANT IN THE FIRST PLACE? Is there some sort of international warrant computer that gets checked whenever someone enters a hotel or something? I don’t think I have any outstanding warrants anywhere in the world (fingers crossed!), but is this a normal thing for the police to just start doing background searches on everyone?
I am sure the missing piece of all this makes perfect sense (probably having to do with airport and landing card and all) but if someone out there could reassure me that there isn’t a secret anti-Ghana movement on the loose, it would certainly quell some of my poor mama’s worries…at least for a few minutes!
oops, not sure why I wrote Sloveniana, it should read Slovenian!
So I assume this guy reported the stolen passport seven years ago. Isn’t there an international database for stolen passports that the German police could have consulted before issuing an international arrest warrant? Or were they just too sloppy? If I’m not mistaken, you are obligated by law to report stolen documents, precisely to prevent such abuse.
To summarize. The passport was stolen during burglary in the UK. The stolen ID was then used without a problem in Germany. Then the man was apprehended based on a valid arrest warrant in Slovenia. And who gets the bad rep? Arrgh!
I did read about similar incidents before. After some searching, I found one documented in Mladina six years ago:
www.mladina.si/tednik/200133/clanek/m-potni/
It’s happened before, it’ll probably happen again.
Careful with those passports, y’all…
Just chip me baby! Privacy is like so 20 century!
@camille: Each day hotels and other similar services must report their guest list (including passport numbers) to the local police. And when they enter the data into their computers lights begin flashing when a name is crossrefferenced to a database of criminal offenes. I imagine this is what happened in this case.
@Katja: we are already chipped. Privacy is an illusion. 21th century privacy doubly so
@pengovsky: Thanks for the info, I had no idea. You’re right. Privacy is an illusion. I am working on living a hyper-public life.
Didnt know about this. Its sad the lack of coverage we have on Slovenia in Serbia.
We get other former Yug republics news in buckets..