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What the Guardian published about “Ben Barka” are just allegations

The opposition Socialist Union Party in Morocco considered that the claim of the British newspaper “The Guardian” that Mehdi Ben Barka was a spy for Czechoslovakia, is “merely an allegation that is not based on evidence.”

On October 29, 1965, Moroccan Ben Barka was kidnapped in front of a Paris restaurant, and disappeared, leaving his file unresolved to this day.

The party added in its newspaper issued today, Tuesday, that “what was promoted about the Mehdi Ben Barka is an unacceptable attack on the martyr, his family, his party and the progressive movement.”

And they added, “After reading what was published by the Guardian , we did not find anything new, but rather a re-publishing of what the French newspaper Express wrote in 2006 .”

The party clarified that “what was published by the French and British newspapers, was the focus of the attempts of the judicial body following the Ben Barka case in France, which concluded, after examining about 1,500 documents from the archives of the Czechoslovak intelligence, that it was not convinced that Ben Barka was a conscript for it.”​​

The party pointed out that “the French judiciary did not find any document bearing the traces of the Ben Barka (a voice recording of him, a book in his handwriting, a signature of him), which made him rule out all these allegations and consider them not serious and useless.”

And on Sunday, the British Guardian newspaper claimed that Ben Barka “was a spy” of the state security service in Czechoslovakia, according to newly declassified intelligence documents.

56 years after the disappearance of the Moroccan leftist opposition Mehdi Ben Barka , the truth of this file has not been revealed, while Moroccan parties and international organizations are calling for it to be revealed.

During the mid-1940s, Ben Barka worked as a teacher for the Moroccan Crown Prince, Hassan II, then became an opponent of the regime, before he was kidnapped in Paris in 1965.

In 1959, Ben Barka, who was born in 1920 in Rabat, split with some other politicians from the “Istiqlal” party, and founded a new party, under the name “National Union of Popular Forces” (later changed its name to the Socialist Union of Popular Forces ), from its opposition agenda- King’s rule.

After the dispute with the palace, Ben Barka began thinking about leaving the country, as he went to Algeria in the first phase, and there he met the leftist Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara before he went to Egypt. And he supported the liberation movements on the Arab and international levels.

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Arab Desk
Arab Desk
The Eastern Herald’s Arab Desk validates the stories published under this byline. That includes editorials, news stories, letters to the editor, and multimedia features on easternherald.com.

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