Eight people, including two prefecture agents, have been indicted, including five incarcerated, after the dismantling of a traffic of false papers to immigrants in an irregular situation, we learned Wednesday from the Paris prosecutor's office, confirming information from TF1.
These eight people, seven men and a woman aged between 21 and 55 according to TF1, were arrested last week and then presented to an investigating judge of the Paris court.
Prefectural staff
They were indicted for "assistance in illegal entry or stay in an organized gang, criminal association for the commission of an offense, forgery, use of forgery, active or passive corruption by a person in charge of public service mission," said the prosecutor. Five of them were placed in pre-trial detention and three under judicial control, the prosecutor's office said.
Among these suspects, "two staff working in the prefecture are accused of having allowed accelerated appointments," said the prosecutor's office. "The staff of the prefecture had to pay a bail, are forbidden to leave the territory and to exercise any function in the prefecture" as part of their judicial control.
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On 27 September 2022, the section for the fight against organized crime and drug trafficking of the Paris prosecutor's office had opened a judicial investigation into trafficking in false documents. "The investigations conducted by the Sub-Directorate for the Fight against Irregular Immigration (SDLII) have established that counterfeiters manufactured false papers from European countries sufficiently similar to real ones, to use them to obtain in the prefecture the recognition of rights on French territory," said the prosecutor's office.
According to TF1, the network offered for an average of 15,000 euros in cash a whole series of false documents - passports, identity cards, driver's licenses, payslips, tax notices, employment contracts and others - to undocumented people. About forty customers have been identified. "Many of these documents were falsified by accomplices in a pharmacy based in Turkey" and then sent to the Paris region by "postal packages" according to the channel. During the searches, 110,000 euros in cash as well as manufacturing equipment were seized, reports TF1.