Many emigrants are seeking foreign passports before China takes over the British colony in 1997.

At a State Department passport office at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, scores of people seeking passports for trips in the coming days were turned away.

There is always a danger that defectors may be seeking publicity or American passports, or that they are pushing a line devised by their South Korean guardians.

At the Federal Police office in Governador Valadares, the main city in this fertile region of rolling hills, the line of people seeking passports each day stretches around the block.

Recent court testimony has shown that members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network have aggressively sought blank American passports.

A1 A high-ranking state police officer was charged with extortion in a scheme to sell false Vermont birth certificates to people seeking American passports.

Many Seek Passports The most concrete sign of the phenomenon, however, is the enormous lines of people reported daily outside Government offices in San Salvador seeking passports.

According to the Justice Department, Mr. Mount did indeed use false names in seeking American passports.

Hong Kong people have begun seeking foreign passports as an insurance policy against a Communist calamity in 1997.

(Puebla is still No.1, but now accounts for less than 50 percent of the city's most recent Mexican immigrants seeking passports.)