Manama: A Gulf national who obtained the Kuwaiti citizenship fraudulently by impersonating a dead Kuwaiti and later used his new status to naturalise 11 people has been arrested.
According to the case documents, the Gulf imposter in 1994 took the identity of a Kuwaiti man who died during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and had no family and told the citizenship general directorate that he had lost his documents during the war.
He supplied the officer with a picture and had him issue new official documents with the dead Kuwaiti man’s name.
He later presented a phoney marriage contract and recorded 11 people, a mixture of Syrians and Gulf nationals, as his own sons, enabling them to obtain Kuwaiti citizenship and benefit from its many professional, social and economic advantages.
He was given large amounts of money for each of the cases, Kuwaiti daily Al Rai reported on Tuesday.
The police were able to arrest one “son” who admitted that he entered Kuwait in 1998 and in 2000 on a family visit to see his two brothers living in the country.
He was able to strike a deal in 2004 with the main forger who added him as a son and obtained Kuwaiti citizenship for him.
The Syrian-Kuwaiti applied for a loan and was given KD30,000 that he gave to the forger and to the middleman.
The Syrian was recruited in the Kuwaiti army where he worked for 10 years before he was sent in 2015 to the US for medical treatment, courtesy of the Kuwaiti government.
However, his forged citizenship was discovered and he left the US for Germany where he was detained after the Kuwaiti authorities had alerted the Interpol.
During questioning, he gave the names of his ten “brothers” and the police launched an investigation into their cases.
Kuwait has been trying to identify the large number of people who obtained the Kuwaiti citizenship fraudulently.
