The Public Prosecution Service imposed a twelve-year prison sentence on Wednesday demanded against 66-year-old Abderrahim el M., who worked as an analyst at the National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Security (NCTV). The suspected judicial officer, specialized in jihadism and Salafism, is suspected of transferring a “gigantic amount” of state secret information to the Moroccan secret service and violating his duty of confidentiality in the period April to October 2023. “The case is unprecedented in scale and duration,” the Public Prosecution Service said.
In October 2023, El M. attempted to take a plane from Schiphol to the Moroccan city of Casablanca. Agents stopped him and found data carriers containing hundreds of secret documents in his luggage. The authorities also came across hundreds of state secret documents in his Rotterdam home. The suspect secretly printed out those documents at work and digitized them at home, the Public Prosecution Service said.
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The contact list of his mobile phone also contained numbers of Moroccan secret agents. He thanked one of them for a supposedly free holiday in the North African country. According to the Public Prosecution Service, the suspect wanted to gather “resources” because he was approaching retirement age.
Initially, the suspect frequently invoked the confidentiality obligation of NCTV employees, but later he explained in detail. „Too little, too late“, the Public Prosecution Service found. On the first day of the substantive hearing, last Tuesday, El M. spoke of a “misunderstanding”, according to the ANP news agency. That is “a huge euphemism for what is going on here,” the court responded.
El M. said he only took the state secrets with him to “work from home” and did not attempt to provide that information to third parties. His managers would also have approved that the suspect kept documents at home, he says. The NCTV management refutes that claim: it is prohibited to take such documents with you. El M. allegedly took the secret documents to Schiphol by mistake, he claims.
On Friday, El M.’s lawyer will speak in the court in Rotterdam, where the case is being heard.
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