Spanish-Moroccan Police Bust Fake Sahrawi Ancestry Ring for Illegal Immigration

In a statement, the Spanish Ministry of the Interior reports that the organization was active in the city of Assa in Assag Zag in the Guelmim-Oued Noun region and carried out its activities with the complicity of a civil registry agent. It charged 3,000 euros to its "clients". In total, nearly 50 Moroccans benefited from its "services" to obtain the false documents of their alleged affiliation with Spanish Sahrawi descendants. This criminal cell specialized in document fraud would have amassed no less than 150,000 euros, the same source specifies.

"The operation began by observing an unusually high number of residence and work permit applications due to exceptional circumstances, in particular family ties, as the criminal organization’s clients presented affiliation documents in various immigration offices across the national territory, claiming to be descendants of Spanish Sahrawis," explains the department of Fernando Grande-Marlaska.

Investigators discovered that "all the family tie residence applications had certain similarities". "Even though they were filed in different provinces, so that at the time of their processing, it was detected that the affiliation documents had been issued in the Moroccan city of Assa," it is further specified.

The operation resulted in the arrest of two people in Navarre for belonging to a criminal organization, facilitating irregular immigration and document forgery, and four others for document forgery in Navarre, Almería and Tarragona. In Morocco, the civil registry officer implicated was also arrested.