Thousands of stolen passports worth millions of pounds could be used for fraudulent or terrorist activity, experts warned yesterday. The Foreign Office admitted a serious breach of security when a van carrying the blank passports was hijacked outside a shop in Oldham, Greater Manchester, on Monday morning. A spokesman confirmed that 24 parcels containing blank passports and vignettes, used for visa inserts, were taken from a van travelling from a printers in Oldham to RAF Northolt, north-west London.

It is thought the consignment contained around 3,000 biometric passports destined for British embassies around the world. The documents are worth £2.5m on the black market, according to police.

The passports were stolen when the driver of the vehicle stopped to buy a newspaper, police said. The thief attacked a second man in the van, before driving a short distance, parking the van and making off with the passports.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said the passports contained no personal details and added that it would be a 'highly complex task' to personalise the documents. Amd phenom tm ii n640 dual core processor driver download. 'The FCO and Identity and Passport Service (IPS) have launched a targeted information campaign directed at organisations that could be presented with one of these stolen documents either for identification or travel purposes.'

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He said the serial numbers of the stolen passports would be entered into the IPS system so that anyone attempting to travel with the document would be stopped at any airport passport control.

The stolen passports contain a chip replicating the data printed on the document. An IPS spokesman said: 'Our hi-tech security features mean that these passports are unusable.'

However, security industry experts warned that with the right equipment the documents could be forged and used to commit crime. Tom Craig, a former Scotland Yard fraud detective working for ID security firm Amarlis, said it was likely that the raid was carried out by a gang with inside knowledge of the shipment.

'It would certainly appear they knew what was inside the vehicle,' he said. 'These passports are very likely destined for criminals, possibly even terrorists. Even if only 10% of them are ever used, that's a lot of criminal activity and a major headache for the security authorities.' He estimated that each blank passport could fetch £1,700 on the black market and said that with the right equipment information could be loaded on to the passports' RFID chip, which carries its individualised information.

'We are potentially talking about 3,000 fake IDs,' he said. 'A good immigration officer should be able to spot them if they have got the right equipment, but these passports .. could also be used for opening bank accounts and various other fraud. They could also be sold to illegal immigrants.'

Industry specialist Steve Beecroft agreed that forgers could print the passports as proof of identity. 'From that one document you could literally create your own identity as a foreign national who last month got a British passport,' he said.

The stolen documents were produced by 3M Security Printing and Systems at a factory in Oldham, but the delivery was made by a different, Home Office-approved, contractor.

The theft is the latest in a series of losses or theft of personal data held by the government. Last year nine NHS trusts admitted they had lost patients' confidential information, while 25 million child benefit records were also lost. Last December it was revealed that the personal details of three 3 million UK learner drivers had been lost by the agency charged with storing them in the American state of Iowa.

Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, called the latest theft a 'serious crime' but she did not believe it 'necessarily shows a sloppy attitude'.