Ten people arrested for being involved in helping people obtain Moroccan nationality

The judicial police arrested, on Tuesday and Wednesday, on the basis of accurate information provided by services of the directorate general of territory surveillance (DGST), ten people suspected of having ties with a criminal network involved in the falsification of official documents in order to obtain the Moroccan nationality and ID.

Among the suspects arrested in this case, so far, there are a Moroccan Jew, three police civil servants, a law enforcement officer, a civil servant of an administrative annexe, a trade official of a travel agency as well as three people suspected of taking part in the facilitation of these criminal acts, said national police (DGSN) in a statement.

The criminal process of the criminal network, run by the Moroccan Jew, consists of falsifying the birth certificates for citizens of Israeli nationality who are not of Moroccan origin, obtain falsified certificates of non-registration in the civil status to include them in lawsuits for registration in the civil status, and later get birth certificates with identities of Moroccan of Jews, the same source said.

The main suspect of this criminal network was planning to help the beneficiaries obtain Moroccan passports for illegal purposes, in exchange for sums of money ranging from 5,000 to 7,000 US dollars, benefiting probably from the complicity of police civil servants, law enforcement officers and public officials.

The suspects were remanded in police custody as part of the investigation conducted under the supervision of the competent public prosecutor's office, in order to shed light on the ins and outs of this case, identify all foreign beneficiaries, and arrest all people who participated or contributed to the activities of this criminal network, it concluded.