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BRITISH passports given to Hong Kong residents before the colony was handed back to China three years ago are being used by criminal gangs to smuggle illegal immigrants into this country.

The National Criminal Intelligence Service in London is now investigating after senior officials in Hong Kong branded the passports the "document of choice" for "people smugglers". In London, the Home Office and Foreign Office are drawing up plans to introduce new passports that will be almost impossible to forge, because of the problems in Hong Kong.

The former colony will be the first territory where the new documents will be issued, although eventually all passports issued overseas will meet the new standard. Two and a half million residents of the former colony were eligible for British National (Overseas) passports, called BN (O)s, which allow travel to Britain and most other countries without a visa.

There are three million in circulation in Hong Kong, including those issued long before the handover. Most people applied for them fearing a communist crackdown on democracy and freedom of speech after the Chinese takeover. The new authorities in Hong Kong have so far largely respected the former colony's traditions and many residents feel that they no longer need a British passport.

They are able to travel abroad freely on the Hong Kong Chinese passport to which they are also entitled. A recession in the Far East that hit Hong Kong residents hard led many people to sell their British passports to "Snakehead" gangs of Chinese people smugglers for anything between £250 and £1,000.

Jean-Paul Delisle, a security consultant at Chep Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong, believes that allowing people to hold two passports was a big mistake. He has said: "The problem is that there are so many people who now qualify for the BN (O) passport who qualify for other passports." He said many people were forced to hand over their passports by criminal gangs. "Some people are being forced to hand over BN (O) passports by syndicates. It can be a way to settle gambling debts."

New photographs and personal details are then entered on the documents by skilful forgers. In Hong Kong, the criminal gangs even hold workshops training people in British ways of dress and customs so that they will not arouse suspicion at immigration control. Trafficking in human contraband is now a big industry. To combat the growing problem, the Foreign Office intends to introduce a new digitised BN (O) in October with security details that it will be hard to doctor.

Photographs will be produced electronically on the passport page rather than being pasted in, and a unique bar code will be overprinted, which only sophisticated technology could reproduce. This should also combat another problem: the counterfeiting of the entire document. Hong Kong immigration officers have discovered a total of 84 completely forged BN (O) passports this year, and they believe that is only a small proportion of the number in circulation.

The problems of people smuggling was highlighted in May when 58 Chinese illegal immigrants were found dead in a lorry at Dover docks.