The suspect in a drug trafficking case was wanted in France in connection with three tons of cocaine seized near Marseille in 2020 but had fled abroad. He was placed on a list of fugitives flagged for arrest by Interpol, the international police organization, and later detained in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
France filed an extradition request with Dubai, but then the French authorities discovered that the suspect, Tarik Kerbouci, 39, had been removed from the Interpol list. Set free by Dubai, Mr. Kerbouci vanished.
A long investigation by French and other law enforcement agencies into how the Interpol arrest flag, called a Red Notice, had disappeared led to an unlikely destination: the former Soviet republic of Moldova. There, a scheme that helped remove Mr. Kerbouci and at least 20 other wanted fugitives from the list unraveled this summer.
The Red Notices are a system of requests to border guards and police forces around the globe to locate and detain fugitives. The notices have been dogged by abuse. China, Russia and other autocratic countries have regularly tried to use them to pursue dissidents and other perceived enemies living abroad, a problem that Interpol has in recent years worked to curb.
Evidence collected by French investigators and prosecutors in Moldova exposed a flip side of such abuse: Fugitives would arrange for the lifting of Red Notices against them by paying corrupt officials to exploit provisions intended to protect dissidents and others seeking asylum.
In Moldova, according to Veronica Dragalin, the country’s chief anticorruption prosecutor, the scheme involved Interpol’s liaison office in the capital, Chisinau, as well as immigration officials. Also under scrutiny for possible involvement is a former senior Interpol official from Moldova who relocated to Dubai after leaving the police organization in 2022.
Fugitives like Mr. Kerbouci, she said, managed to lift Red Notices against them by convincing Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, that they had requested asylum in Moldova, even though they had never been there.
In an effort to protect refugees fleeing persecution, Interpol does not allow Red Notices against officially registered asylum seekers.
The asylum requests made by Mr. Kerbouci and other suspects, Ms. Dragalin said, were “entirely fraudulent,” fabricated by corrupt immigration officers in Moldova and certified as genuine by the Interpol office in Chisinau.
“The mechanism worked like a big carousel going round and round,” Moldova’s police chief, Viorel Cernauteanu, said. “On the surface it all looked legal, but underneath it was all based on fraud and lies.”
The carousel began, he said, with petitions by fugitives or their lawyers to an Interpol commission in Lyon responsible for reviewing Red Notices. They would ask that a notice be lifted because of an asylum request in Moldova. As supporting evidence, they would provide fraudulent confirmation of the asylum request from the Moldovan immigration authorities.
“They wanted to create a paper trail so it was not immediately evident this was a corruption scheme,” Ms. Dragalin said.
“But they got sloppy,” she added, noting that most of the fugitives who told Interpol that they had requested asylum in Moldova provided addresses in Dubai. Also, they all used nearly the same wording in their communications with Lyon.
In some cases, she said, Moldovan officials failed to provide the necessary fake documentation. Instead, fugitives sent Interpol clearly forged documents in the name of the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.
The organization declined to comment on the misuse of its name.
Before agreeing to lift a Red Notice, Interpol would ask the Chisinau liaison office — which was in on the racket — to confirm that the asylum requests really existed, without any other checks. The answer, of course, was always yes.
That, Chief Cernauteanu of the Moldovan police said, was “obviously untrue.”
“There was no real verification of whether these people ever entered our country,” he added.
The head of the Chisinau office, Viorel Tentiu, was detained after a June raid on his office and on 32 other sites in Moldova. Seven subordinates at Interpol’s liaison office in Chisinau have been suspended.
The F.B.I. said it was providing technical assistance to help decipher data on telephones and computers seized in the raids. British law enforcement has also been involved because of a separate but overlapping inquiry into what investigators in London described as “high harm cybercriminals” who paid Moldovan officials to reveal whether Interpol had issued Red Notices against them.
Most of the names of people subject to Red Notices are kept secret, accessible only to law enforcement agencies and Interpol offices. Interpol has made public only about 10 percent of the 72,000 notices currently in the system to avoid tipping off suspects that they face arrest if they travel.
The office of a Moldovan lawyer suspected of engineering bogus asylum requests and a Chisinau residence belonging to Vitalie Pirlog, a former justice minister, were also raided in June. From 2017 to March 2022, Mr. Pirlog was head of the Interpol commission that reviews Red Notices.
Mr. Pirlog, who lives mostly in Dubai, had been visiting Moldova but left shortly before the June raids, the prosecutors said. A lawyer for Mr. Pirlog in Chisinau, Nicolae Posturusu, declined to comment.
In addition to Mr. Kerbouci, nine Chinese nationals, the son of a former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, a fugitive Australian businessman, two Ukrainians, a citizen of Belarus and fugitives with other nationalities used the scheme, according to a list compiled by Moldova and obtained by The Times.
It cost $1 million to $3 million in bribes and payments to lawyers for each suspect to purge their Red Notices, Ms. Dragalin said.
Prosecutors are trying to determine who orchestrated the scheme and what role, if any, was played by Mr. Pirlog.
The investigation that led to the raids in Moldova began last year when Interpol detected what it described in a statement as “attempted misuse in a small number of cases to block and delete Red Notices.” It reported the matter to the French police, who opened the inquiry in August.
Prosecutors in Paris, who have been working closely with Ms. Dragalin’s office, said in a statement that evidence collected in France had pointed to “a corruption scheme to allow fugitives to block and erase Red Notices targeting them, by paying bribes to public officials, particularly in Moldova.”
The prosecutor handling the case in France declined in an interview to identify any French nationals who had used the scheme or to comment on Mr. Kerbouci, the suspect in the drug trafficking case.
Moldova has long struggled with graft. The country this summer began formal negotiations to join the European Union and is under heavy pressure from Brussels to rein in corrupt officials.
The current pro-Western leadership in Moldova has made “some progress” in that regard, according to a report last year by the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union. But Moldova is still dealing with the legacy of Vladimir Plahotniuc, a powerful tycoon who, with support from the United States, which viewed him as a bulwark against Russian influence, gained control over much of the country’s law enforcement, intelligence and judicial systems in the 2010s.
Mr. Plahotniuc fled Moldova in 2019 after his political allies lost an election. He has since been charged in absentia with creating and leading a criminal organization, fraud and money laundering.
One of his protégés during his ascendancy in Moldova was Mr. Pirlog, who, after serving as justice minister and intelligence service director, became chairman of the Red Notice commission at Interpol in 2017.
Interpol has played down the operation uncovered in Moldova. “Our robust monitoring systems identified suspicious activity in relation to a small number of Red Notices. We took immediate action,” the organization’s chief at the time, Jürgen Stock, said in June.
“While we are confident in the strength of our systems, we do not tolerate misuse of any kind,” he added.
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