Moroccan agent lists torturers
A former Moroccan intelligence agent, Ahmad Boukhari, has said he has drawn up a list of 123 alleged torturers from dark days in the country’s history, including a man who is now a politician.
“The list I drew up, with a clear conscience, in February 2004 includes 123 torturers of different ranks and from different services, knowing that the real, complete list should include about 200 names,” Boukhari on Monday said in an statement in the Al Ahdath al Maghribia daily.
The newspaper, close to the governing socialist party, published no names. The period covered by Boukhari, who has come out with major revelations in the past, was 1960-1980, when the current King Mohammed VI’s late father Hassan II was on the throne of the north African country.
Boukhari said he had only compiled his list after “several years of thought and hesitation”, to denounce people who “resorted to politics to protect themselves”.
Example
He gave the example, without a name, of “provocation and lying statements by a former torturer in the police detective squad, who’s now a politician without shame.”
Torture was “predominant in all sections” of the criminal investigation police during the period when left-wing and far left political parties were repressed by the authorities, Boukhari said.
|
“The list I drew up, with a clear conscience, in February 2004 includes 123 torturers…” Ahmad Boukhari, |
In 2001, he made a series of revelations about the 1965 kidnapping, torture and murder of Ben Barka – a former leader of the Socialist Union of Popular Forces – at the hands of Moroccan government officials, including the interior minister at the time, General Muhammad Oufkir.
Boukhari then told French daily newspaper Le Monde and Morocco‘s Le Journal that Ben Barka was kidnapped in Paris and tortured to death by Moroccan government officials before his body was shipped back to Morocco with French complicity to be dissolved in a cauldron of acid.
In his published comments, he said he wanted to help a reconciliation panel recently set up by the government to probe human rights violations during decades of repression.
The newspaper distanced itself from Boukhari’s published statements, but commented that they they should “not be taken for simple, baseless allegations.”