The police arrested the suspect on air after his appearance in a television show.
Rabat – Law enforcement in Turkey have arrested a man on air for defrauding many Moroccan women.
The man allegedly took huge amount of money from the women, promising to find them Turkish husbands, several Turkish news outlets reported.
The Turkish man allegedly brought hundreds of women from Morocco to Turkey.
Some of the victims are also men, most of them in their late 30s, early 50s and 60s. The men spoke in the Muge Anli program, a popular Turkish TV show, about their experience with the scandal.
While reports in Turkish news outlets spoke of 600 Moroccan women, the show does not provide the exact number of Moroccan victims. At the beginning of the show, however, one of the victims showed pictures of “seven young Moroccan women” from whom he was asked to choose.
“My sister liked this one, but my mother preferred that one,” he said, pointing to the pictures. He said his family was told that one of the pictured women would arrive in Turkey by New Year. “But we heard from none of them.”
Muge Anli, the show’s host, who is widely known for exposing such cases on the air, said that the “fake marriage gang” is a common occurrence in the country.
“They are deceiving pure, real people,” she explained in the show, pointing to how most of the victims are usually low-income people in need of love or affection who “innocently” give all their savings to “ill-intentioned” people who take advantage of them.
“I will not live this here. I will go to the end,” Anli said in the show, as the audience and the victims applauded after she informed them that the police had arrested the suspect in Gaziantep, a Turkish city in southwestern Anatolia.
In the “fake marriage” case, the suspect is said to have used photos of Moroccan women, looking for Turkish husbands to lure his targets to get big amounts of money.
Some of the victims said they paid the suspect up to 40,000 Turkish Liras (approximately $7000) a sum of money, without being able to meet their future wives.
The suspect admitted the crimes attributed to him, saying that some of the Moroccan victims were minors.
The man also has connections in Morocco, with his Moroccan collaborators beloved to have put him in contact with Moroccan women seeking to immigrate to Turkey.
