Thousands of blank British passports taken

LONDON, July 29 (UPI) -- The British Foreign Office says hijackers who stole 3,000 blank passports in England won't be able to use them because of new security features.

The passports are of the new variety with embedded electronic chips replacing data printed on the documents and so will be no use to anyone else, officials told The Times of London.

The blank passports were being transported Monday morning from a printing plant in Oldham, England, to the Royal Air Force Northolt base near London when the van carrying the documents was hijacked, Foreign Office authorities said.

A spokesman for Britain's Identity and Passport Service told the Times that security features such as the chip left the passports unusable, adding, "The police are doing everything in their power to catch the perpetrators."

The passport incident is the latest in a string of security embarrassments for the British government in which officials have admitted misplacing or losing millions of documents of citizens' personal data.