Word: hassan
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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...
...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...
...least one important Frenchman seemed convinced of the police's suspicions. Charles de Gaulle summoned his ambassador from Rabat to carry back to Hassan a personal message of his concern over the violation of French sovereignty. The implication was clear enough: Oufkir should be fired. From his palace in Fez, the King released a statement denouncing the French police charges as a plot to disgrace Morocco, and expressing his confidence in his ministers-a sign that he was not about to buckle under to French demands. With that, Hassan canceled a trip to Paris, where he was to have...
...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...
...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...