Tests reveal that two 'child' migrants were in fact fully grown adults in their 20's and 40's

The two men presented themselves to officers at a police station in the commune of Angoulême claiming that they were 16-years-old in order to take full advantage of the asylum system which helps underage people seeking asylum.

One of the men, who reportedly claimed to be from Mali was revealed to be 21 years old, whilst the other man, who presented a birth certificate claiming to be from Guinea, was revealed to be 47 years old following a fingerprint test which had revealed he was connected to a passport which he had been used to enter Spain.

Prosecutor of the Republic of Montpellier, Christophe Barret cited similarities to other cases of age exaggerations to the men in Angoulême saying, “Recently, an isolated minor supported by the county council of Hérault had said he was 17 years old. The department had doubts. Extensive verifications have formally confirmed that he was 32 years old, in fact.”

The scale of the problem concerning fake underage migrants in France was highlighted last year when police in Montpellier busted a fraudulent network from the Ivory Coast who were forging documents in order to help adult migrants claim asylum as minors.

In total, the migrants who used the forged documents were able to defraud French taxpayers to the sum of nearly a million euros in benefits they were not qualified for.

In other countries, there have been prevalent cases of adults pretending to be children as well, such as in Germany where almost half of the underage migrants, 49 percent, in the city of Hamburg were shown to be adults in 2017.

The Swedish National Board of Forensic Medicine (RMV) also released figures in 2017 that show a majority of cases of disputed “underage” migrants are actually adults.

When medically testing 1,481 migrants to determine whether or not they had lied about being under the age of 18, it was revealed that 1,215, or 86 per cent, of the individuals tested were adults.