Moroccan Truckers Sentenced for Smuggling 76 kg of Cannabis into France

In addition to the prison sentence, the two Moroccan truckers were also fined 309,000 euros in customs duties. The Montauban Judicial Court also imposed a 10-year ban on entering the national territory, reports La Dépêche du Midi. Abdelaziz Moufid, 39, and Ahmed Essaddiki, 36, had been placed in pre-trial detention on July 16. This is the end of a case that was postponed twice, a trial in immediate appearance of two men from Tangier.

The hearing lasted 4 hours on July 21. Pierre Le Bonjour, the lawyer for the two Moroccan truckers tasked with transporting a semi-trailer of leeks from Agadir to the Netherlands, raised several procedural nullities, including one concerning the customs control. "Since September, the Constitutional Council requires customs to justify their control as is the case for the judicial police," he pointed out, referring to Article 60 of the Customs Code which authorized its agents to carry out their control at their discretion.

"They continued the checks as before the Constitutional Council’s decision: this customs visit is unconstitutional," the defense argued, before demanding the annulment of all the acts of this seizure and the release of his clients. This provoked a reaction from the customs legal expert. "Until September 1, 2023, the provisions of Article 60 remain applicable as long as the reform has not been published," she specifies, assuring that it was "the strong smell of cannabis emanating from the pallet outside the truck" that provoked this unexpected control. "It’s not I smell, I’m going to check, it’s the opposite that happened when we read the customs officers’ report," the lawyer retorts. According to him, there is no need to "discuss the Constitutional Council’s decision".

After this debate, the "convoluted" statements of the two men from Tangier were mentioned. According to them, two men had forced them to load 6 bags containing 76 kg of cannabis at a rest area in Grenada, Spain. "If you were forced, why didn’t you call the gendarmerie during the trip?" the deputy prosecutor Lisa Bergereau questions them. "We were paralyzed," Abdelaziz finally admits. The magistrate continues: "Yet you were exchanging with a certain Hassan during the journey." "The problem is not that," the trucker finally admits. "They knew us, they knew where our families are in Morocco, we were too afraid." Unconvinced by their answers, the magistrate requested 2 years’ imprisonment, a 10-year ban on entering the territory and continued detention.