According to his family, the 46-year-old Sunni-Muslim was shot dead in Baghdad in December 2017, one month after his asylum application in Finland was rejected and he voluntarily returned to Iraq.

His daughter brought the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled last November that Finland had violated the man's human rights by turning down his asylum request.

The Strasbourg court ordered Finland to pay the family 20,000 euros ($21,500) in damages.

However, Finnish police said in a statement that an investigation was underway into suspicions that documents submitted to the ECHR had, in fact, been forged and that "the claimant's relative is alive".

A number of individuals had been questioned and one person has been arrested in the probe, police said.

In its ruling, the ECHR did point out that only photocopies of Iraqi documents pertaining to the man's death were submitted to Finnish authorities, and that their authenticity could not be verified.

Nonetheless, the court ruled that Finland was in breach of articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention of Human Rights, as domestic authorities should have been aware "that the applicant's father could be exposed to a danger to life or a risk of ill-treatment upon his return to Iraq."