Marrakech – The ballot fraud case in Tangier widened on Thursday, when the King’s prosecutor general at the Tangier Court of Appeal announced the arrest of two more suspects and asked that they be investigated in pretrial detention.
The two were brought before the public prosecution after the necessary technical examinations were completed in a case that had already led to the arrest of five people. The prosecution is pursuing them for the felony of violating voting operations and participating in forgery.
According to the statement issued Thursday, the first suspect works as an accountant at a company and took part in marking a political party’s symbol on ballot papers. He did so at the request of his employer, the second suspect.
The marking took place inside an apartment in a hotel unit. The second suspect was there with the accountant and two other people, and the group had two bags filled with ballot papers. All of them worked to mark the symbol of one party on the ballots.
Technical work allowed investigators to recover the hotel’s surveillance footage, which had been deliberately erased. The recordings placed the second suspect in the apartment alongside his accountant and two others now held in pretrial detention in the same case. They stayed until the group left together, accompanied by the suspect who had taken the ballots out of the polling office and returned them.
The footage also established that the two bags seen in the apartment were the same ones later seized at two polling stations. Investigators concluded the second suspect was present when the ballots were brought in and marked.
A technical examination of his phone revealed several calls he made before and on election day to two of the people already held in pretrial detention in the file.
On the basis of these findings, the prosecution requested an investigation against the two suspects in pretrial detention. It added that it would track the proceedings and submit the necessary petitions, in line with its concern for strict application of the law.
The two arrests extend a case that began on September 23, election day. A bag holding electoral documents was found near the polling station at the Al Qods school, in the Casabarata district. A video showing a man being stopped with the bag circulated on social media and raised questions about how the vote was run in the constituency.
The mayor named and detained in the ballot case
An observer from the Neo-Democrats Party (PND), Mohamed Sorroukh, recounted to Medias24 what he witnessed. He described a man with a black bag entering a polling station and putting hundreds of ballots into the urn while several observers were briefly absent.
About fifteen minutes later, the same man returned with a blue bag holding between 500 and 600 pre-filled ballots in favor of the Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM), and a woman then arrived with a similar bag. Alerted by Sorroukh, police and authority agents intervened and opened the bags.
The prosecution opened a judicial investigation at once. Five suspects were arrested, among them the presidents of two polling stations and their two deputies.
On September 26, the prosecution laid out its account of events. The man caught with the bag, a polling station vice-president, had allegedly removed a batch of ballots from inside his office with help from the station’s president. He hid them in the bag, took them out of the school, then worked to bring them back into two polling stations in coordination with others.
Investigators also found that the ink on the seized ballots differed from the ink used at the polling stations. The prosecution then asked the investigating judge to open a judicial inquiry for suspected attacks on voting operations, falsification, and participation in those acts.
The case has reached the mayor of Tangier, Mounir Laymouri, of PAM. On Thursday, the investigating judge ordered his placement in pretrial detention. Laymouri, mayor since 2021 and head of the association of Moroccan mayors since 2022, also ran the party’s campaign in the city.
A national search warrant had been issued against him on September 25, after one of the accused named him during questioning. Authorities contacted Laymouri, then went to his home, where they did not find him. His departure for Spain through the Bab Sebta crossing led to the warrant.
Laymouri denied fleeing. He told Le360 the trip abroad had been planned in advance and had no link to the judicial developments in Tangier. He was arrested on Monday at Tangier Ibn Battouta International Airport, arriving on a flight from Malaga, and placed in police custody that evening.
His hearing before the judicial police lasted about ten hours. He chose to stay silent after investigators presented recordings of calls connecting him to people prosecuted in the case before election day. His custody was extended on Wednesday.
A victory shadowed by scandal for the PAM
The affair embarrasses the PAM, which won the September 23 legislative elections. The party’s co-leader, Fatima Ezzahra El-Mansouri, who also governs Marrakech, has been tapped by the King to head the next government. PAM has responded by calling the matter a “carefully orchestrated scenario.”
The case has also given ammunition to the Justice and Development Party (PJD), which finished fourth and whose leader, former head of government Abdelilah Benkirane, spent the campaign attacking what he called “the corruption” of the PAM, a party founded in the late 2000s by Fouad Ali El-Himma, a childhood friend and now the main advisor of the King.
The PJD’s national council has voted to sit in opposition, vowing it will not be part of a corrupt governing coalition.
Alongside the judicial track, the Interior Ministry opened an administrative one. It sent an inspection commission to Tangier to examine the irregularities in the two polling stations.
The affair recalls a precedent at Safi. In January 2023, the Constitutional Court annulled the election of Rachid Bougattaya, a PAM deputy elected in a partial vote, after finding a ballot leak that involved a box of about 300 ballots.
The court held that the number of ballots and the absence of proper precautions cast doubt on the integrity of the process, and it annulled the result even though a related criminal complaint was dropped.
In the Tangier-Asilah constituency, the PAM list was headed by Abdellatif El Ghalbzouri. The list drew 13,687 votes and finished second, and El Ghalbzouri was elected among the five deputies.
