OP, I really hope your friend is coming over first thing today so you can get to ringing a solicitor. This should be the number one thing on your to do list today, even ahead of feeding the children etc (OK I don’t suggest you leave them unfed all day 😂) but you know what I mean. And I would not send them to school or nursery until things are a bit more sorted than this just in case.
You need to say it is urgent and you must speak to someone today, as your husband who is from the ME came to get the children’s passport details and you fear he plans to abduct them imminently. And you are looking for their help to apply for a very urgent (like today/tomorrow) prohibited steps order to block him from leaving the country with them. I know it’s scary to think about and may seem overly dramatic to you at this point. None of us want you to be crying and terrified but unfortunately an international child abduction can happen all too quickly and be all too real and irreversible. I really hope we are all wrong and your ex has no intention of this, but it is very hard to think of a reason why he would be asking for the passport details that has no sinister motive behind it, and it’s too much of a gamble with your precious children to leave it up to chance. If you take these steps to protect them it won’t do any harm and massively protects things in the event of an attempted abduction in the future.
DO NOT SAY ANYTHING TO HIM about your suspicions as a previous PP has suggested. That would be a disaster and will only either invite abuse or even worse, cause him to speed up his plans to abduct them before you can get everything in place. If you say this he could use force to take the children there and then and go straight to the airport. Keep it quiet and play the oblivious and compliant ex wife so that he doesn’t know you are on to him, at least until all the steps talked about have been taken. If you get a prohibited steps order granted, he will have to be informed of it officially at that stage so he will know at that stage that you know but you’ll have made an abduction attempt so much harder (and ensured police taking it seriously and triggering border alerts and recovering the children if he does actually take them).
You said you reported the passports lost? As you have them, I personally would have just called and asked them to add the caveat, but it’s done now and isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless it leaves the door wide open for him to apply for replacement passports if you haven’t also told them that you are worried about abduction so if you didn’t mention this please call them back too!
Good luck! Do let us know how you get on. And don’t feel bad for giving him the passport details, it’s good you didn’t hand over the actual passports and it’s good that his requesting them rang an alarm bell in your head and made you post here. Now you need to act on that alarm bell. I do know how stressful it is to be in a situation like this (my ex is from a non Hague convention Caribbean country and threatened abduction early on after we split, he did actually take him out of my care three times but fortunately not out of the country so I was able to get him back, but this is how I know the risks and the likely response of school and also police if you don’t have a prohibited steps order which I did not the first time as I was blindsided by it. Fortunately for me the first couple of times he only took him for the evening to show me that he could and brought him back to school ok, the third time was more serious but because I had the prohibited steps order and had alerted the passport office etc, he knew it would be hard to get him out of the country and I was able to get him back with an emergency court order and police involvement plus border alerts etc).
I know it’s difficult to juggle “normal life” stuff around trying to sort out this sort of nightmare but it absolutely must take priority today xx