The immigration officer in question worked at the Sandakan airport and has allegedly been secretly accepting payments to help secure safe passage for IS militants from Indonesia and the Philippines.

According to The Star, the 31-year-old female officer is believed to have arranged for the militants to head to the southern Philippines through Sabah, without proper travel documents.

It is not known if she has been smuggling people for monetary gain or a deeper IS agenda. So far, she is allegedly known to have helped three of such militants.

In related news, another six people were arrested for their alleged involvement with the IS terror group during a five-day special operation by Bukit Aman which started last Wednesday in Sabah and at KLIA.

A source told The Star that these arrests in Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan showed that IS was aggresively using Sabah as a transit point to bring more fighters to southern Philippines. It was also a back-up destination for militants from South-East Asia who failed to go to Syria.

This is the latest scandal faced by the local immigration department in Malaysia the last being an arrest of a director of the Perak Immigration Department.