A former senior official at Interpol, the international police organization, has been detained in the United Arab Emirates under an arrest alert issued by his former employer at the request of France.
The former official, Vitalie Pirlog, is wanted in France and his home country of Moldova in connection with a sprawling investigation into a scheme that allowed wanted fugitives to get red notices — which are arrest alerts — lifted in return for payments to corrupt officials.
A statement released on Wednesday by the U.A.E.’s ministry of interior said Mr. Pirlog had been apprehended on Sunday and “now faces multiple charges, including forgery, bribery, facilitating bribery, and fraud.”
Nicolae Posturusu, a lawyer for Mr. Pirlog in Chisinau, Moldova’s capital, declined to comment on his client’s detention. Samuel Health, the spokesman for Interpol in Lyon, France, also declined to comment, saying Mr. Pirlog’s case was “a matter for local authorities” in the U.A.E.
From 2017 until 2022, Mr. Pirlog, who previously served as justice minister and intelligence service director in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, led a powerful and highly sensitive commission at Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon responsible for reviewing red notices.
After leaving the police organization, he relocated to Dubai and came under scrutiny from French and Moldovan investigators looking into how dozens of fugitives wanted for drug trafficking and other crimes had managed to void Interpol arrest alerts against them.
These included Tarik Kerbouci, a suspect in a major cocaine trafficking case in France who fled to Dubai and was placed under a red notice. After his arrest in Dubai, the red notice against him mysteriously vanished and he was set free.
It turned out that Mr. Kerbouci and other fugitives had, through lawyers using forged documents, convinced Interpol that they had requested asylum in Moldova, even though they had never been there, prosecutors said. In an effort to protect refugees fleeing persecution, Interpol does not allow red notices against officially registered asylum seekers.
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.
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 by paying corrupt officials and lawyers in Moldova to exploit provisions intended to protect dissidents and others seeking asylum.
The scheme, described by Moldova’s police chief as a “big carousel” of corruption, came crashing down last June when Moldovan prosecutors, aided by the F.B.I., raided more than 30 properties in Chisinau, including the local Interpol office and a residence owned by Mr. Pirlog.
Mr. Pirlog had been visiting Moldova but left shortly before the raids, stirring suspicions that he had been tipped off in advance.
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 8 percent of the 80,000 notices currently in the system to avoid tipping off suspects that they face arrest if they travel.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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