A Doha Criminal Court has sentenced an expatriate woman in absentia to three years imprisonment and subsequent deportation for forging official documents, local Arabic daily Al-Sharq reported yesterday.
The woman was accused of forging government stamps and signatures of unidentified officials on two university degree certificates. The Public Prosecution charged her of working in collusion with an unidentified culprit based abroad, who counterfeited the documents on her demand. Further she was also charged with supplying that person with false information to issue her the forged documents as if issued by a certain Arab university.
The forgery was discovered when the accused woman approached Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs department of attestation to get two of her documents attested: A university degree certificate and a statement of her graduation grades, supposedly issued by the same Arab university. The employee concerned doubted the authenticity of the submitted documents and accordingly held the documents to conduct further inquiries about their origin.
Eventually, the university mentioned within the documents as the source was contacted to make sure that they were issued by it. However, the university confirmed that the said lady never graduated from there.
At the investigations, the accused woman admitted that she asked somebody at another Arab country to issue her such documents and submitted them to the attestation department.
