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PARIS. — Your lost or stolen passport may have found a new life in the shady underworld of a crime gang or in the pocket of a terrorist plotting an attack. Like crime syndicates, terrorist networks are often globe-spanning operations, and doctored documents are the keys to unlocking borders and staying below the radar.

Fighting bogus identities is now a top security priority, with France’s interior minister pushing for Europe-wide action, and Interpol pleading for tougher document policing as it warns that the world is awash in 38 million lost or stolen passports that are ripe for doctoring.

False identities have complicated the task of investigators trying to untangle the many-tentacled and overlapping networks that carried out the recent attacks in Paris and Brussels. Many of the attackers used fake identities.

Investigators spotted the trail of Najim Laachraoui after he built the bombs used in the Paris bloodbath — but couldn’t stop him before he blew himself up at the Brussels airport four months later because they knew him only from his fake Belgian ID under the name of Soufiane Kayal. — AP.