UNDER REGISTRATION

  • ANDROS LOZANO

Updated Saturday,27May2023-23:15

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  • CHRONICLE Antonio and the 5 postmen with postal votes assaulted in Melilla by hooded men
  • Dead 'moved' in no man's land between Nador and Melilla: according to the cadastre (and the BBC) is Spain

The boy, who is not more than thirty years old, says he saw everything that happened. It happened "a few years ago", in the Cañada de Hidum, the most marginal neighborhood of Melilla. He explains that a young Moroccan who was in a square with a group of kids was wounded by a bullet in the leg because of a confrontation with other thieves in the area for the control of the retail of drugs: hashish, grams of coca ...

"Luckily for him, the wound was shallow. Brother Aberchán, who has a thousand eyes

Around here, he came to the neighborhood to calm things down before things got hotter. Among a few friends of the wounded man they took him to the doctor's clinic and he healed him. The boy showed up with a bandage hours later." It was the umpteenth work of the

Doctor Sacabalas.

The source you talk to

Chronicle

refers to the leader of the Coalition for Melilla (CpM), Mustafa Aberchán. This is the Melilla surgeon, of parents born in Morocco, who in this electoral campaign has again been involved in a scandal of political corruption that, for the moment, has resulted in a dozen detainees.

One of them is his own son-in-law,

Abdel-ilah Nourdine Ahmed

, which in the autonomous city is known as

Abulobo

. "He is the dog of prey on the street of his son-in-law," says a person who knows in detail the ins and outs and social ties of Melilla. Another of those arrested is the

Number Three

of CpM and local government adviser, Mohamed Ahmed Al-Lal, whose passport has been revoked. The city's president, independent Eduardo de Castro, ousted him this week.

In the opening image of the report, Mustafá Aberchán, participating in a popular race in Melilla. On these lines, of child.

Behind this alleged dismantled mafia would be a corruption plot aimed at buying postal votes to guarantee the presence of CpM in the next local government. At the beginning of the operation, 11,727 ballots requested for postal voting were questioned, after several robberies of postmen occurred and police protection had to be put during their workday. His daily work became a risky job. Given the "seriousness" of the facts, the State Attorney General's Office has ordered Anticorruption to lead the investigation. It would be, according to the prosecutor,

"of a large-scale vote-buying operation"

in a city of 84,700 inhabitants, but with less than 60,000 citizens with the right to vote. It was necessary to resort to asking for the DNI at the post office window to try to contain the fraud.

Finally, 5,814 postal votes have been accepted as valid.

Almost 10% of the census

. They are more than half of those obtained by CpM in 2019 (10,472), when it was the second force with the most support after the PP, and more than those achieved by the PSOE (4,928). On the last day to make the right effective, 2,002 voters attended. The question is where are the other 6,000 remaining that have not been effective.

"They say they are hidden in bags or that they are already burned"

, says a resident of Melilla on the phone.

Although in the rest of Spain some political leaders have torn their clothes, the suspicion about the formation of Aberchán has not surprised too much in Melilla. The CpM leader has already been convicted of another almost identical electoral fraud, committed in 2008. At that time he acted in collusion with the then local secretary of the PSOE, Dionisio Muñoz Pérez. First, the Provincial Court of Malaga, in 2018, and then the Supreme Court, in 2021, sentenced them to two years in prison and disqualified them from public office. The disqualification of Aberchán remains in force until August of this year, so, despite controlling his party, with a Muslim majority and pro-Moroccan,

He has not been able to lead the candidacy for this Sunday's elections.

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office is already investigating 'a large-scale operation of vote buying' by mail in Melilla, where one in six is doubted

Although in 2008 Aberchán did not stain his hands, the sentence is categorical about his role at the head of that fraud: "

He directed and supervised what was done at his party headquarters.

, having gone on occasion to the Post Office to inquire about the progress of the plan (...)", reads a passage of the ruling. "I had contacts in the postal service who could provide them with

Access to envelopes

».

Aberchán, fond of running, has a good relationship with Morocco, where his parents come from, who worked as shopkeepers when they settled in Melilla. "It is evident that their interests pull more towards the neighboring country than towards Madrid," say sources of the State Security Forces deployed in the autonomous city. With "good contacts with businessmen and with the intelligence services of Morocco", to which he even owes the cost of having paid for the career of Medicine in Granada, his name has once again sounded like a starting shot of a marathon of alleged cases of vote buying that have been dotting the map of Spain in recent days:

Mojácar (Almería), with seven detainees -two of them from the PSOE candidacy-

, Arona (Tenerife), Albuidete (Murcia), La Gomera, Sayago (Zamora)...

In most of these cases there are suspicions about socialist candidacies.

Mustafa Aberchán obtained a scholarship from Morocco to study medicine in Granada.

CHRONICLE

But, among all the cases, the largest is that of Melilla. Allegedly, in CpM they bought votes in exchange for the payment of between 50 and 150 euros, or offered voters to enter municipal employment plans if the party re-entered the local executive.

Investigators suspect that the city's drug traffickers, well known in the international hashish trafficking business, may have financed Aberchán's party.

The main way to raise money by CpM would be by using local businessmen close to the party or by

Deliveries of cash from the narcos themselves.

As this reporter revealed yesterday when having access to exclusive documentation, the objective of the traffickers would be that CpM, which has already governed in coalition during the last mandate, would re-enter the government of the autonomous city to, once achieved, they obtain gifts from the local Executive or access minor contracts with the Administration that can facilitate money laundering. It is investigated whether 20% of the budget of the formation of Aberchán in the last year comes from organized crime. "They give that money to the party to be returned in exchange for contracts with the Administration,

This is how these narcos launder their money and interests.

».

"IN COURT... GOD WILLING"

By mid-afternoon last Friday, Aberchán was responding to several messages sent by this journalist, who asked him to talk to him for a few minutes. "I will defend myself in court... God willing," he said.

"After your head of the CNI, no thanks"

. He was annoyed by the cover of EL MUNDO last Wednesday, when this medium revealed that

people close to him held several meetings in Rabat with people close to the Moroccan government.

during the weeks leading up to the first vote thefts.

Who has not yet said anything about Mustafa Aberchán is Yolanda Díaz, vice president of the Spanish Government and leader of Sumar. His party is allied with CpM in the so-called Turia Agreement, an amalgam of formations where there is that of Íñigo Errejón, Más País, or that of Joan Baldoví, Compromís. All these formations limited themselves to pointing out that they were breaking their alliance with Aberchán.

It was a hot potato that threatened to burn them.

However, they will never be able to disassociate themselves from the images in which the Melilla surgeon appears with them. As in that poster that gave so much play to Pablo Iglesias in his social networks. On March 10, Aberchán participated in Valencia in a political act with Errejón, Baldoví or Alberto Rodríguez, former deputy of Podemos and today candidate for the Canarian presidency for the Drago platform. In a tweet, Iglesias showed the poster and said: "In this photo there is a man who was convicted of buying votes and who was president of Melilla thanks to the support of Jesús Gil.

It is good to build alliances but not with corrupt

».

Iglesias was referring to that strange alliance that led Aberchán, now 63, to be president of Melilla between July 1999 and July 2000. Today, from his villa built near the border on land bought by him, the leader of CpM must remember the day that Gil, mayor of Marbella (Málaga),

He decided to hand over power to him.

Although he had been imprisoned months before, his formation had been launched to try to govern cities such as Ceuta, Melilla or La Línea de la Concepción, in Cádiz.

That day it was Aberchán's turn to win.

He was supported by the deputies of his party, those of the GIL, those of the Independent Party of Melilla and also two of the PSOE who skipped the orders coming from the national headquarters of the Socialists, since Ferraz had forbidden to agree with any candidate of the party of the former president of Atlético de Madrid.

Aberchán, although he leads CpM, has not been able to be a member of his party's candidacy in these elections because he is disqualified until August of this year.

CHRONICLE

Mustafa Hamed Moh Mohamed Aberchan, the man targeted last week, was born on October 17, 1959. He grew up in the Melilla neighborhood of Monte María Cristina. He belongs to the Berber clan of the Aberchán. His parents, born in Morocco, ran a fuel store near the border. He studied high school at the Colegio del Carmen, in Melilla, of the De La Salle Brothers. "He was a very smart kid," says Luis, a former classmate. Then, he crossed to the peninsula to study medicine in Granada thanks to a scholarship from the Moroccan government. There, in the Caliphate city, he met his wife, Zahra Karam, born in Larache.

She is also a doctor. They have five children. Two of them, adopted.

Aberchán specialized in Digestive Surgery. However, he did not have to pass the Resident Internal Medical (MIR) exam, due to an agreement between Spain and Morocco that is no longer valid today.

He obtained Spanish nationality at the age of 27, after the regularization process carried out by the Government of Felipe González in Ceuta and Melilla, by which he granted the DNI to the Muslims of both cities. Until then, Mustafa only had the so-called

Statistics card

, which only proved his residence in the Spanish autonomous city.

So did his three brothers.

"BAD PERSON AND WORST SURGEON"

Until 1994 he practiced at the Regional Hospital of Baza, in Granada, as a surgeon, but the agreement of the Moroccan Government expired and prevented him from continuing to practice in a Spanish public hospital. He returned to Melilla in 1995, where almost nobody knew him. He founded CpM and disassociated himself from the Socialist Youth, where he was active in his youth.

He opened a private practice in which he could only perform minor surgical operations.

He was also undergoing surgery in a hospital in Nador, on the other side of the border. He now works as a surgeon with a place in the hospital of Melilla.

Several officials who have worked with him in the ICU of that medical center describe him as extremely intelligent, "but a bad person and a worse surgeon."

"Some patient has left a scar from a big toe just to sew a slit of nothing."

In 2019, days before the elections that brought his party back to power – even if it was in coalition – Aberchán explained to this newspaper why they called him the

doctor pulls them out

in the underworld of the city. He said he had never intervened on anyone clandestinely. "I have operated on many people who have been shot, but always in an operating room," he said. Although he later qualified: "I am very committed to marginalization and

I have treated people who do not have insurance and who cannot access the public hospital

». Also, as the Prosecutor's Office suspects, his commitment comes from afar with falsifying the elections.