Confusion mounts over Syrian passport found at Paris attack site

ISIL claimed responsibility for a string of coordinated attacks on Friday that left 129 people dead and hundreds of others injured in the French capital. 

The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the passport was either stolen by ISIL or fabricated based on a real identity. 

Separately, Serbian newspaper Blic reported Monday that police in Serbia had detained a refugee holding a Syrian passport with the same data as the one authorities found at the scene of the Paris attack. 

“A document with the same name and same data but with the photograph of another man was found on Saturday on another migrant in the [reception] center in Presevo (a town in Serbia’s far south) and that person was held for questioning,” Blic reported, without citing a source.

Greek and Serbian authorities have confirmed that the passport found outside the Stade de France soccer stadium — where the three suicide bombers struck — had been issued to a man who registered as a refugee in October on the Greek island of Leros, and applied for asylum in Serbia a few days later.

Earlier Monday, the French prosecutor's office had said that the passport “remains to be verified,” but that the fingerprints of the dead attacker matched those taken in Greece in October.

Serbian officials said that they believe both passports — the one found on the bomber and the one held by a detained refugee — were fake, and that authorities are working with French authorities to determine where the documents originated, U.K. newspaper The Guardian reported.

Initial reports indicating the passport belonged to one of the suicide bombers prompted several far-right political groups across Europe to use the discovery as an argument against welcoming refugees and other migrants into Europe, which is facing its worst refugees crisis since World War II. 

An estimated 500,000 refugees — more than half of them women and children — have arrived in Europe this year, according to the International Organization for Migration.  

France's anti-immigration National Front leader Marine Le Pen called for an “immediate halt” to new arrivals, and Germany's PEGIDA movement drew thousands to its latest anti-Islam rally. But Germany's government said ISIL may have intentionally sought to create tensions by using the passport “to politicize … the refugee question.”

Several U.S. governors have also expressed doubts about letting Syrian refugees into their states under the federal government’s refugee resettlement program. Some of the governors said they want to suspend refugee intake until the security process for vetting them is reviewed, but it remains unclear whether states have the legal authority to decide which refugees are resettled. 

Al Jazeera and wire services