Forged property contract used twice, appeal rejected

TDT | Manama

Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

A man who submitted a forged property contract during expert proceedings has lost his appeal against a oneyear prison sentence.

The High Criminal Court rejected his arguments and confirmed the punishment.

The case concerns the same Arabic-language contract used by the defendant in an earlier civil lawsuit.

Evidence

That document, presented as evidence in a dispute over an apartment sale, had already been declared false by forensic specialists and had led to a previous conviction.

The signatures were found to have been copied from genuine documents, and key details such as the seller’s name and the contract language had been changed.

Despite those findings, the defendant presented the same document again in a different civil matter, this time handing it to a court-appointed expert.

Separate offence

Prosecutors treated this act as a separate offence, arguing that the defendant knew the document was forged and intended to use it to influence the outcome of the case. The court agreed.

Judges dismissed the defence’s claim that the second submission occurred before his earlier conviction, noting that the expert report confirming the forgery had already been issued.

The judgment made clear that knowledge of the document’s falsehood was enough to establish guilt, regardless of when the earlier ruling had been handed down.