INTERPOL MENA Police Chiefs Meeting Targets Money Laundering, Illicit Finance and Transnational Crime
Police chiefs from across the Middle East and North Africa met in Cairo on 1–2 September 2026 for an INTERPOL regional meeting focused on transnational organised crime, national-security priorities and emerging cross-border threats.
INTERPOL said key agenda items included disrupting illicit supply chains behind drug trafficking, human trafficking and migrant smuggling, as well as combating money laundering and illicit finance. Delegates also discussed adopting the new INTERPOL Operational Task Force Model to support more agile and integrated regional operations against criminal networks.
Operation Ramz highlighted
The meeting also reviewed the recent Operation Ramz, a coordinated cyber operation involving 13 countries. INTERPOL said the operation resulted in 201 arrests and the identification of a further 382 suspects.
Nearly 8,000 pieces of data and intelligence were distributed among participating countries to initiate or support investigations. The operation focused on phishing and malware threats as well as cyber scams, while the broader meeting linked cyber-enabled crime with the region’s organised-crime and illicit-finance challenges.
Regional partners contributing to the meeting included the Arab Interior Ministers Council, the Gulf Cooperation Council Police Organization and Naif Arab University for Security Sciences. Member countries also proposed joint regional operations for 2027.
The AML relevance lies primarily in INTERPOL’s explicit focus on money laundering and illicit finance as part of the operational response to transnational organised crime, rather than in treating cyber-scam activity alone as an AML event.
