Supporters of the Polisario Front demonstrated in Gran Canaria on 14 November to demand that terminally ill activist Mohamed Salem be allowed to return to El AaiúnElvira Urquijo A. (EFE)
A recent ruling by the National Supreme Court denying Spanish citizenship to a citizen of Moroccan origin shows that in 2010 the National Intelligence Center (CNI) discovered the existence of a Moroccan spy network collecting information about “the Polisario Front”. [la] Moroccan colony based in Spain”. The judgment of May 31, to which EL PAÍS had access, emphasizes that this citizen allegedly had contact with a “chief” of the Moroccan secret service, whose identity he does not reveal. In at least five other cases over the past 11 years, Spanish courts have refused to grant citizenship to as many citizens from the North African country over CNI reports warning that the applicants had been spying on Rabat.
In June 2021, in the midst of the diplomatic crisis between Morocco and Spain over the hospitalization of the leader of the Polisario Front and President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Brahim Gali, in Logroño, a confidential CNI document was already alerting the government of the intensive Moroccan espionage activities in Spain against this organization. Specifically, the report states that the Moroccan intelligence services activated a dual “judicial and media strategy” to “harass” Gali and “hamper his mobility.”
The CNI then assured that Rabat was using “sufficient resources, including financial ones,” to “put pressure on the Spanish government to achieve a favorable position for Morocco in the Western Sahara dispute.” In March 2022, Pedro Sánchez abandoned Spain’s traditional position of neutrality in the Sahara conflict, maintained for 47 years, and sided with Rabat, describing its autonomy proposal for the former colony as “the most serious, realistic and credible Suggested solution” looked at the dispute”. Shortly after this latest announcement, it was revealed that the cellphones owned by Sánchez himself, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska; Defense chief Margarita Robles and then-State Department head Arancha González Laya, who would step down from the executive branch the following July, were victims of attacks using Pegasus spy software.
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The recent judgment of the Third Division of the Administrative Disputes Chamber of the National Court of Justice confirms these Moroccan activities in Spain. The court order states that the suspected collaborator with the Moroccan secret service began the process of obtaining Spanish citizenship in May 2010. To that end, he claimed that he had been living legally in Spain for 22 years and that during that time he had “never been arrested for a crime, not even with an administrative sanction”.
The complainant concluded that these data were evidence of “his perfect social, cultural and family integration in Spain”, underlined by the fact that he lived with his wife and two children, and these three already had Spanish nationality owned. It has also been argued that both the judge in charge of the registry office – who is in charge of questioning the applicant to “check whether he is adapting to the Spanish culture and way of life” – and the prosecutor’s office and the General Directorate of Police do so done would have reported positively so that he was granted citizenship. The first even pointed out that he spoke the Spanish language “correctly”.
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Nevertheless, on April 10, 2019, the request was rejected by the General Directorate for Registers and Notaries of the Ministry of Justice. The reason was the inclusion in the file of nationalization of a report “whose authorship the judgment does not name, but which, as this newspaper was able to confirm in police sources, was drawn up by the CNI”, which advised against granting Spanish nationality to this Moroccan citizen “for reasons of public order or national interest”.
The ruling stressed that, according to the intelligence document, there was “evidence” that the Moroccan national had “collaborated with the Moroccan intelligence services since 2010, when he was in contact with their boss.” This fact was considered sufficient to consider that the applicant had not “justified” the “good civic conduct” required under Article 22.4 of the Civil Code for the granting of Spanish nationality, and was rejected.
The Moroccan national filed a contentious administrative claim in July of the same year, which has now been rejected by the national court, with the support of the prosecutor representing the Ministry of Justice. In the decision, the court considers that the CNI report is sufficient reason to reject the Moroccan citizen’s application, as it proves that he does not meet the “integration” requirements, although there were other positive reports on the file .
It is not the first time that a ruling by the national court has brought to light the North African country’s alleged espionage activities in Spain. The last case became known in September. Then a court rejected the application of an employee of the Moroccan consulate in Madrid, against whom the Spanish secret service had been investigating since 2011 as a suspected “local spy agent” in the Maghreb country. Then the CNI report accused this operative of having “close ties with his country of origin” and “with the current head of Moroccan intelligence in Spain.” The Moroccan national denied this.
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