Word: barka
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...masterminded the kidnaping of Mehdi ben Barka, 45, the leftist Moroccan exile who disappeared in Paris late last month? French police thought they knew, and the name of the suspect was enough to throw a severe chill into Franco-Moroccan relations. For the suspect was King Hassan II's own Minister of the Interior, General Mohamed Oufkir...
According to the police, Oufkir was in Paris at the time of Ben Barka's disappearance not for the reason he gave -that he was taking his children to their Swiss boarding school. Instead, the cops said, he had come to oversee the abduction. The police also established a motive: in his dickerings with King Hassan for a rapprochement between the palace and Moroccan leftists, Ben Barka had demanded Oufkir's dismissal as one of the conditions...
French police began a nationwide search, for Ben Barka was no routine case. The founder of Morocco's leftist National Union Party, he has twice within the past two years been sentenced to death in absentia for plotting to overthrow King Hassan II. Such notoriety naturally led to speculation that political skulduggery might be involved...
...four days the police got nowhere. Then last week an Air France public relations man at Orly Airport stepped forward with information which he said his conscience compelled him to bring to the police. He was Antoine Lopez, a Frenchman who had struck up an acquaintance with Ben Barka some years ago in Morocco. Lopez frankly admitted that at the behest of another old friend, one Georges Boucheseiche, he had intercepted Ben Barka in front of the restaurant, persuaded the Moroccan to drive with him to Boucheseiche's villa on the outskirts of Paris. There, Lopez was given...
...Barka's followers in Morocco charged that he had fallen victim to a conspiracy of right-wingers within the Rabat government, who wanted to block any chance of a reconciliation between the King and Moroccan leftists -something for which Hassan has been ardently working. A part of the reconciliation plan calls for a full pardon for Ben Barka and his eventual return to Morocco. But there were just as many reasons for believing a handful of other hypotheses, including one that members of his own party had pulled the snatch to keep Ben Barka from returning to Morocco...