The Provincial Police Information Brigade has gathered evidence that points to the leader of the Coalition for Melilla party, Mustafá Aberchán, as the person most responsible for the attempted electoral fraud by mail in the autonomous city, sources of the investigation inform elDiario.es. The Investigation Court number 2 of Melilla maintains an investigation that remains secret and within the framework of which the police work is carried out. Aberchán still does not have the qualification of investigated by the court.
The investigation focuses on the purchase of votes by mail. Aberchán’s party allegedly paid citizens to request their vote by mail and deliver the documentation with the Coalition for Melilla ballot to be deposited at the Post Office. The alarms went off when the Zone Electoral Board detected that the applicants for the vote by mail exceeded 10,000 last Wednesday, which would mean approximately 20% of the population with the right to vote in the May 28 elections, ten times more than the Spanish average.
The reaction of the Zone Electoral Board was to request the DNI from anyone who went to the Post Office to cast their vote after having made the mandatory request. Before this measure, it was only necessary to present the documentation in the application process. This measure caused the long queues that existed at the Post Offices in recent days of people waiting to request to vote remotely to disappear.
Parallel to the measures of the Central Electoral Board, the court number 2 of Marbella opened an investigation based on the report that the Police had presented to it and decreed the secrecy of the proceedings. Aberchán was sentenced in the past for buying votes. The Provincial Court of Malaga determined in 2018 that the leader of the Coalition for Melilla (CPM), Mustafa Aberchánand former secretary general of the local PSOE Dionisio Muñoz Pérez had orchestrated a purchase of votes cast by mail in the 2008 Senate elections. The Supreme Court later upheld the ruling.
Aberchán, a doctor by profession but with decades in politics, became president of Melilla in 1999 thanks to an agreement with Jesús Gil’s party in an experiment that lasted a year and ended with a motion of no confidence. Recently, the Coalition for Melilla has joined the so-called Turia Agreement, an alliance of left-wing and regionalist forces that also include Más País, Compromís or the Chunta Aragonesista, although Aberchán has not attended the acts that have staged said union.
fraud aborted
The closing of the period to request the vote by mail yesterday produced a total of 11,707 requests in Mellilla, but only 921 people had ended up exercising that right at 12:00 p.m. this Thursday, 7.8%. This noon, the Government delegate in Melilla, Sabrina Moh, assured that she was already in a position to guarantee “fair elections.
“We have been fast, we have been effective and, above all, forceful,” he said in an interview on Antena 3, in which he also denied the possibility of suspending the next elections: “We Melilla people will be able to be calm with the electoral process” . “Thanks to all the deployment that we have done through the different devices and, above all, with the support that we have right now from both the Zone Electoral Board and the Central Electoral Board, we can guarantee clean elections,” Moh has declared. The Government delegate thus alluded to the measure agreed by the Central Electoral Board that extended the obligation to present the DNI when depositing the vote by mail for Melilla from any Post Office in Spain.
