Word: oufkir
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...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 of an impending reconciliation between the King and the exiled leftist leader, which Oufkir and other right-wing Moroccans were determined to prevent...
...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...
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...
...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...