The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is finalizing the drafting of an agreement with Oman for the transfer to Spain of Fátima Ofkir, the youngest prisoner imprisoned abroad, as confirmed by diplomatic sources. The drafting of this agreement would allow 24-year-old Ofkir to continue serving his sentence in a Spanish prison. The same sources point out that the process is progressing little by little, although they avoid giving a specific date for the signature. For her part, her lawyer, Mónica Santiago, from the Vosseler law firm, is optimistic about a possible repatriation. “Representatives of the Spanish embassy in Muscat informed Fátima that there was very serious progress towards the signing of the agreement, but it has not yet been specified when it will be”, he says.
For three years, the Spanish authorities have been in dialogue with Oman with the aim of signing an agreement on the transfer of people convicted by the Sultanate. This would be a framework agreement designed for all Spanish convicts but in practice it would only affect Fátima Ofkir, as she is the only Spanish prisoner convicted in Oman. The agreement he was looking for is similar to the one he signed in 2022 with Qatar and which allows all prisoners sentenced in the emirate to be sent to Spanish prisons.
Fátima Ofkir was a resident of L’Hospitalet and had been president of the National Council for Childhood and Adolescence of Catalonia, a position in which she represented all Catalan students before the Generalitat, a sign of the good reputation she had at her school and of their involvement with the studies. When he turned 18 and after a period of family ups and downs and hanging out with the wrong people in the neighborhood, he tried to prove to his new friends that he wasn’t afraid of anything and agreed to go to Oman in look for a package Once there, she made several videos in which she boasted of having landed in Muscat and recorded with satisfaction the hotel in which her Dominican friends from l’Hospitalet had put her up. “What do you think, do I live badly?” he boasted, focusing on the pool. The next day, she was arrested after Omani authorities caught her with a packet of morphine in her bedroom cupboard. They sentenced her first to eight years in prison and then to life imprisonment. “Here she would have been sentenced for drug possession, at most 4 years in prison”, points out her lawyer, who took on Fátima’s defense when the judicial process was exhausted and the sentence was already final. In the event that she is transferred to Spain, she believes that she could end up in third degree prison, which involves going to prison only to sleep, taking into account her profile and the seven years she has been sentenced to. The lawyer, who channels the defense through the social action platform of her office, has intensified efforts so that the diplomatic route is fruitful and Fátima can benefit from a pact between states or from a pardon from the Sultan , the latter possibility more remote.
The lawyer was in Muscat prison in July last year to visit Fátima. “She has some health problems and she’s a bit depressed”, she says honestly. Santiago acts as the young woman’s liaison with her studies. He is taking his first high school course through Cidead, the Integrated Distance Learning Centre. “The tutor sends me the exams, I send them to the embassy and they deliver them there, Fátima takes them with the prison officials and they collect them and send them to me, who hang them on the system”, he explains. “His tutor already knows his situation and that I act as liaison. Everything is going very well.”
