KUWAIT CITY, Nov 19: A Kuwaiti criminal court has delivered a sweeping verdict in one of the country’s most shocking nationality fraud cases, sentencing a Sudanese man to life imprisonment and imposing a staggering fine of 480,000 dinars.

The defendant, who managed to slip through the system more than three decades ago, fraudulently secured Kuwaiti citizenship in 1993 by claiming he was of “unknown parentage”—a loophole under Article 3 reserved for the most vulnerable cases. With his new identity, he secured a position at the Ministry of Defense, only to later be dismissed for repeated absenteeism.

For years, he lived undetected. In 2010, he quietly left Kuwait for Sudan, seemingly confident that his fabricated identity would remain buried forever. But the truth began to unravel in dramatic fashion. The Nationality Investigation Department, during a routine review, uncovered suspicious inconsistencies in his file—triggering a multi-year probe spanning Kuwait and Sudan.

Investigators, working through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, contacted the Sudanese authorities and obtained the man’s original documents. The revelation was explosive: he was a Sudanese national, living with his family, and had never been parentless as he had claimed. The entire citizenship file he built between 1993 and 2024 was a carefully crafted forgery.

In November 2024, the Council of Ministers formally stripped him of the Kuwaiti nationality he had held under false pretenses. Today’s court ruling marks the dramatic end of a 31-year deception—one that the authorities say stands as a warning to anyone attempting to manipulate Kuwait’s citizenship system.