Moroccan Man in France Searches for Birth Parents After Decades-Long Mystery

"Anyway, Brahim is costing me too much. If you want him, keep him. Besides, he’s not my son, I adopted him, I took him from Morocco." This conversation dating back to the 1990s between a Ddass official and Safia in the presence of Brahim allows the teenager, who was then between 13 and 14 years old, to discover the unthinkable: his mother and father were not his biological parents. He had been raised in Aklim, 25 kilometers from Berkane, by parents called Ali and Safia. The latter and he, then aged six-seven, had settled in Gennevilliers, France. After the couple’s separation, the teenager remained with his adoptive mother, who gave him a strict upbringing.

As an adult, Brahim seeks to know his true origins. Unable to count on either his adoptive mother or his adoptive father who "has rebuilt his life and completely disappeared from circulation" in the early 2010s, he goes to Aklim where he meets old-timers. This trip will be of some use: he learns that newborns were stolen towards the end of the 1990s from young illiterate and underprivileged mothers, and sold for money, under the guise of adoption, to families who could not have children. He discovers that Ali and Safia had/would have received a first baby, a premature child born around mid-September 1978, but the infant would have died at the age of one month. Back at the Berkane hospital, a nurse named Fatima would have provided the couple with a substitute baby. Brahim would be this replacement baby who would have received the same first name and the same date of birth, August 22, 1978.

"I think I am this replacement baby, a stolen baby who bears the name of another stolen baby," thinks Brahim, who confided in the Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure. His research will lead him to a hospital information management service, then to Rabat. There he meets the nurse Fatima. The meeting will not be fruitful. The 70-year-old woman with cancer says she remembers nothing. Brahim does not give up, however. In a narrative entitled "the lost child," he tells his story and asks MyHeritage, an online genealogy platform, for help. By consulting its international DNA database, it finally discovers a genetic link with a 19-year-old girl of Moroccan origin (Berkane like Brahim) living in Belgium, more precisely in Flanders, with an estimated link of 7%. Brahim has contacted her, but she was unable to help him. Back to square one.