Fake Surgeon and Hospital Staff Jailed for Botched Cataract Operation in Morocco

It all started with the difficulty for a patient suffering from cataracts to get an appointment for a surgical intervention at the Rabat Specialties Hospital. The events took place in 2022. One day, a security guard at the hospital with a criminal record for breach of trust approached the forty-year-old and offered to help him. He promised that he would undergo the operation as soon as possible with the help of a colleague working in the emergency department without having to go through the hospital’s ophthalmology department. The latter contacts the patient two days later, informing him that all arrangements have been made to welcome him in the operating room and perform the surgical intervention, reports Al Akhbar.

The patient then goes to the hospital as agreed. The security guard, another security guard and the fake surgeon install him in one of the small isolated rooms of the hospital reserved for the security guards. Once the operation is over, the patient pays the security guards and the fake surgeon. The latter prescribed an unstamped prescription to the patient and asked him to come back for a "check-up" after a month and a half. But before the end of this period, the forty-year-old discovers that he can no longer see. He had completely lost his sight. In early August 2022, he filed a complaint against the two security guards and the fake surgeon with the competent prosecutor’s office of the Rabat Court of First Instance.

In his complaint, he claims to have been the victim of a serious scam by the three individuals, after undergoing a surgical operation that made him lose his sight. The judicial police investigators of the Hassan Agdal region and the officials of the Ibn Sina University Hospital in Rabat discover that the accused are a retired nurse born in 1960, and two security guards of the Specialties Hospital born in the 1980s. They will be arrested, placed in custody and then tried before the criminal chamber in charge of financial crimes of the Rabat Court of Appeal. On Monday, it sentenced them to four years in prison.