June 16, 2007 12:20 PM

LONDON (AP) -Dozens of successful asylum seekers have been asked to turn in their British passports amid suspicion that many who claimed to have escaped the Serbian province of Kosovo in the late 1990s were actually from Albania, a British newspaper reported Friday.

Britain's embassy in Tirana was investigating whether some asylum seekers, who claimed to be ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing Serbian oppression in Kosovo, were actually migrants from neighboring Albania, the Evening Standard said.

The paper did not give an exact figure, but said Britain's Border and Immigration Agency had sent letters to dozens of people asking them to hand in their passports until their status could be resolved.

Britain's embassy in Tirana was investigating cases where individuals had used a false nationality to apply for asylum, an embassy spokesman said on condition of anonymity in line with government policy. Citizenship would be revoked in cases in which fraud was proven, the British Border and Immigration agency said.

The Albanian Embassy in London said it still wasn't clear whether any of the asylum seekers had done anything wrong. First Secretary Dastid Koreshi said that some might by now have British children, complicating any eventual effort to send them back.

Although still legally part of Serbia, the overwhelming majority of Kosovo's population is ethnically Albanian, and many have family links which bridge the border with neighboring Albania. Britain welcomed some 4,000 people from Kosovo under a U.N program in 1999, amid a Serbian crackdown on independence-seeking ethnic Albanian rebels.

At the time, asylum applications to Britain were at their highest level in years. Since then, immigration laws have hardened, and the government has made cracking down on fraud and deporting failed asylum seekers one of its priorities.