Word: barka
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Police Peugeot. The scandal turns about Mehdi ben Barka, a shadowy, diminutive Moroccan émigré who had fled his native land for nomadic exile around the Mediterranean six years ago. The founder of Morocco's leftist National Union of Popular Forces Party, he was twice sentenced to death in absentia for plotting to overthrow King Hassan II. Someone wanted that sentence carried out, at home or abroad -and, to many, the most likely someone was Hassan's rightist Interior Minister, Mohamed Oufkir. Apart from Oufkir's fierce hatred of Ben Barka, there had been rumors...
Last Oct. 29, Ben Barka arrived in Paris for a lunch at the famed Brasserie Lipp. He had no sooner alighted from his taxi on the Boulevard St. Germain than he was met by an S.D.E.C.E. agent and two French policemen acting for the Moroccans. They bundled him into a police Peugeot, and took him to a villa in suburban Fontenay-le-Vicomte. It has since been established that Oufkir, accompanied by the head of the Moroccan secret police, flew from Rabat to Paris next day. Whether by coincidence or not, Ben Barka was never seen again...
French Complicity. This month Parisians were being titillated by press interviews with a French ex-convict and freelance barbouze (undercover agent) named Georges Figon, who claimed to have seen Oufkir torture Ben Barka with a curved Moroccan knife at the suburban villa, then leave him to suffocate in his bonds. When Figon's accounts first began to appear in two weekly magazines, Minute and L'Express, the government tried to ignore the affair-just as the Gaullists had done during the December presidential election. Then, last week, the police moved in to arrest Figon, but, they reported...
...Interior Minister to the French courts, but privately he conveyed to Hassan that the Elysée would not be satisfied until the King at least fired Oufkir. But King Hassan was angry too: he already had canceled a state visit to France because of the Ben Barka affair. At week's end he was still refusing to sack Oufkir, even though Paris threatened to cut off the $100 million in annual aid that Morocco, still closely tied to France after ten years of independence, needs for survival...
...Morocco's leftists, the French charges seemed to confirm the suspicions that they had felt all along-that Ben Barka had fallen prey to a right-wing conspiracy not only against the leftists but against Hassan as well. At week's end the Union Marocaine du Travail called a one-day strike in protest against the government's refusal to pursue a full investigation. The King called out troops in both Rabat and Casablanca to keep the strike from turning into full-blown riots...