A former worker for the Dutch counter-terrorism unit NCTV has gone on trial for leaking state secrets to Morocco.
Abderrahim el M worked for the NCTV where he reported on salafism and jihadism. At the same time, the public prosecution office alleges, he led a double life spying for the Moroccan secret service.
In 2023, the justice department was alerted to the man’s illicit activities by the domestic intelligence unit AIVD, which filmed M printing and bagging classified information.
The AIVD said the El M’s contacts with the director of the Moroccan counter-intelligence service dated from at least 2020.
The video footage of El M printing out documents using a pass borrowed from a colleague who was also arrested led to his arrest at Schiphol moments before his flight to Morocco.
He had 928 documents in his possession, including 345 documents from secret service AIVD and 65 from military intelligence service MIVD.
“This case is unique and possibly one of the biggest security scandals of the last decades,” national security expert Rowin Jansen told broadcaster NOS. “It is definitely not normal practice to print confidential documents and take them home.”
The contents of the documents have not been revealed but almost certainly contained analyses by the AIVD and MIVD, including a report about the activities of the Moroccan intelligence service in the Netherlands, and a list of phone numbers of Moroccan IS fighters.
Jansen said the risk of intelligence breaches in the Netherlands has been increasing. “The Netherlands is an innovative, prosperous country and has a strategically important position within the EU and Nato with a concentration of secret information in the departments,” he said.
At an earlier preliminary hearing, El M said he “had in no way handed over state secrets to anyone”.
Email traffic
However, the public prosecutor said emails between El M and the Moroccan intelligence service in which M asked if he could hand over “the medicine” or “a small something” are proof that he did.
As a reward, the intelligence service paid for frequent trips to Morocco for him and his family, the correspondence showed.
El M could spend 15 years in prison if convicted.
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