Mohamed el Maadioui was unjustly arrested and imprisoned on February 18 at El Prat airport when he was confused with a drug trafficker wanted by the French authorities. After spending nine days behind bars, he was released with a ban on leaving Spain while waiting for France to rule out that he is the drug trafficker they are looking for. Since then, he remains trapped in the country without being able to return to Morocco. “I want to return home to my family and I can’t,” he laments in a conversation with La Vanguardia.
The National Court has issued an order to France to rule out that Mohamed is the drug trafficker they want to capture. Until this information reaches the court, the hearing will not return his passport and he will not be able to return to Morocco. “If the French authorities do not respond within this week, they have told us that it would be resolved ex officio, and we understand that they will let him return to his country,” explains Mohamed’s lawyer, Arantxa Menéndez.
The ordeal of this 72-year-old Moroccan began as soon as he landed at El Prat airport. He had come to Barcelona to visit his children, who live in Mataró, a city where he resided for thirty years before returning to his hometown near the city of Nador. After passing the security check, he was detained by the Police. His name and date of birth matched those of a Moroccan drug trafficker wanted by French authorities who had been sentenced to ten years in prison. Immediately, he entered the Brians 1 penitentiary center waiting to know if he should be extradited to France. “I was handcuffed at the police station for two days and they gave me the bare minimum to eat,” Mohamed denounces in precarious Spanish.
That language barrier prevented him from pleading with the police that he was not the one they were looking for and that his arrest had been a mistake. When he testified by videoconference before the National Court, the translator who assisted him did not speak his own dialect, so he could not denounce that everything had been a confusion. “There were 30 hours of madness in which we didn’t know where he was,” laments his nephew Ahmed. “The police also didn’t let him talk to his son, who was waiting for him in the arrivals area of ??the airport,” he adds, indignant.
The mistake was that France had issued an international search and arrest warrant in which the name of Mohamed el Maadioui appeared, which did not include his passport number and which did not take into account that in Morocco in the 60s they used to put the same last name and the same date of birth –January 1– to all the inhabitants of the same town. “Before the 70s, in the Rif, there was no official documentation of the birth of its citizens and they only wrote X X. They translated this to 1 of 1 and the only difference there was was the year of birth. It was a common practice. For this reason, many birth dates are repeated among people born before 70. In the case of my uncle and this criminal, they were both born in 1952,” explains Ahmed. “In addition, the man who is wanted and captured has documentation in France, where he has lived and has a family, wife and children. Nothing to do with my uncle,” he adds.
On the ninth day, and after verifying that the photograph of the individual they were looking for did not match that of Mohamed, he was released. A month later, the man still has nightmares about what he experienced. “I’m fine now, but sometimes I can’t sleep. Although I try to avoid it, I keep thinking and reliving everything I have been through,” he says sadly. Since 1991, Mohamed has had a residence permit in Spain. He worked sixteen years as a gardener in a company in Cabrera de Mar until he retired and decided to return to Morocco. He had never been arrested nor does he have any criminal record of any kind. “You have the papers and all the things, but they still put you in jail,” he denounces.
