A 61-year-old man entered a plea of not guilty in federal court yesterday to charges of identity theft and obtaining a false passport.

Robert William Read was originally detained in Jakarta in 2008 for allegedly attempting to obtain an Indonesian passport using counterfeit identity documents, according to papers filed in federal court here.

Read, who was born in Tennessee in 1948, allegedly admitted his true identity to Indonesian authorities and told them he had been living in Malaysia and entered Indonesia illegally in December 2007, according to an affidavit here filed by State Department diplomatic security agent Edward Blodget.

Blodget said further investigation disclosed that Read had obtained a false U.S. passport in 1993 by using counterfeit identity documents of an individual who died in 1993.

He received another passport in the same false name in 2003 from the U.S. Embassy in Singapore, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

Read allegedly used that passport more than 100 times to enter and exit countries including the United Kingdom, Singapore, Kuwait, the Philippines, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, according to Blodget's affidavit.

In 2007, Read allegedly applied to receive additional pages for his passport at the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, but fled after embassy personnel became suspicious, according to the affidavit.