RABAT – Moroccan historian and activist Maâti Monjib was arrested in Rabat on Tuesday, several news sites reported, citing his close friend Abdellatif El Hamamouchi.
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The arrest took place in a restaurant in Hassan, in downtown Rabat, adds El Hamamouchi who testified to the scene with a short alert message on Facebook.
The same source confirms the arrest, specifying that eight plainclothes police officers apprehended him.
Maâti Monjib was directly presented to the Financial Crimes Prosecutor’s Office in Rabat for alleged money laundering, according to the same source.
Maâti Monjib has been the subject of “judicial harassment” since 2015. Last October, a petition was launched to support the Moroccan historian and journalist, who observed a three-day hunger strike.
The online petition entitled: “Cease the judicial harassment against Maati Monjib”, was initiated in support of the historian targeted by a preliminary investigation into alleged acts which would constitute, according to a press release from a judicial body in Rabat , elements constituting the crime of “money laundering”, but which, in fact, according to the journalist-historian, falls within the framework of a trial opened in November 2015 and postponed 20 times since.
Indeed, this “obscene and false” accusation is not new, he said on his Facebook page, assuring that the objective was to give an appearance of “common law” to his case because, he said, in the trial opened against him in 2015 “the charges were, mainly and officially, of a political nature: undermining the internal security of the state, weakening of citizens’ allegiance to state institutions”.
“I declare once again here that I am totally innocent of false accusations and with defamatory purposes and that I have never threatened the security of the State: things that I am reproached without the slightest proof,” he wrote.
This activist calls in particular for the end of the police and judicial harassment against his person and his sister and the end of the defamation campaign waged against them by certain media which he describes as “offices of the political police”.
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