sentenced to six years in prison in March, the Moroccan journalist was investigating land expropriations involving relatives of Mohammed VI. The Forbidden Stories organization, the purpose of which is to carry out unfinished investigations, continued the survey.
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Registration dates from December 22, 2019. On radio M, Ihsane El Kadi, director of this Algerian independent media, receives Omar Radi, a used Moroccan colleague to investigate the links between power and business in Morocco. He evokes his investigations in the Douar Ouled Sbita, within the commune Sidi Bouknadel, close to Rabat: “[the inhabitants] were fired from their agricultural land where there was a forest. The forest [was] shaved , we put in its place a golf course and we have privatized the beach (…). We put hundreds of luxury villas and housing. We are in a logic of land predation. “For this journalist renowned for his I am frank, the troubles start…
Back to Morocco, the police summons it. He is placed in detention, on the pretext of a tweet hostile to a judge. After a week and a massive support campaign, he was released provisionally. “I was punished for all of my work,” he said. And it’s not over… In June 2020, Amnesty International and the organization Forbidden Stories reveal that his phone was infected with the PEGASUS spy software. More serious: on March 3, 2022, he was sentenced on appeal to six years in prison for “infringement of the internal security of the State” with “funding from abroad” and for “rape” – two separate files, however educated and judged jointly.
In the first case, an ex-colleague from the newspaper Le Desk accused her of having raped her, in July 2020. Displayed the facts, speaking of a consented relationship. In the other file, he is notably accused of having met Dutch officials considered by the prosecution as “intelligence officers”. The NGO Human Rights Watch then protested against its conviction. “The charges for espionage were inadmissible because based on nothing, estimates one of the executives of the organization for the Middle East and North Africa, Ahmed Benchemsi. As for the accusation of rape, it would have deserved a Just trial, as much for the accused as for the complainant. “In fact, several NGOs and journalistic surveys denounce instrumentalization by Moroccan power From the fight against sexual violence to political ends. Omar Radi, who has already spent two years in prison, appeared in the cassation.
the addo -tin subterfuge
Are his troubles linked to his work on expropriations? Forbidden Stories continued the investigation into the Douar Ouled Sbita, this seaside site where an real estate developer, the Addoha group, set out, in the fall of 2006, to develop a project called “Plage des Nations “. A resident of the village, Mohamed Boudouma, mentioned on France 24 , in February 2017, behind the scenes of the operation:” Our tribe was approached by state representatives who wanted to buy [ The coastal portions. Delegates, which we have not chosen, negotiated in our name with the Ministry of the Interior, which is the owner of these lands, according to a law inherited from the colonial era. We have one that a right of use. These delegates gave us cheating by saying that these lands along the coast would be sold to the king. In reality, they were sold to the Addoha company. “
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