The Cases of Seven Men Detained in March and April 2010

In April 2010, Moroccan newspapers, citing the state news agency Maghreb Arabe Presse (MAP), reported that officials had announced the dismantling of a terrorist network of 38 men in the cities of Casablanca, Kenitra, and Berchid.[39] The men were allegedly “preparing to carry out assassinations and acts of sabotage inside the country, particularly against security agencies and foreign interests in Morocco, sending Moroccans to the hotbeds of tension, especially Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia.”[40] MAP reported that on May 6, the National Brigade of the Judiciary Police (BNPJ) in Casablanca had turned over 38 individuals in their custody to the prosecutor on suspicion of involvement in a terrorist network.[41]

The press reports did not include a full list of the suspects. From the complaints of “kidnapping” and “disappearance” that the suspects’ families submitted to Moroccan human rights organizations [42] and interviews with some of the family members, researchers identified and made phone contact with seven of the suspects who provided accounts of their arrest and detention, and the names of their co-accused.[43]

Abdelaziz Janah , 32, a merchant in Bouskoura-Chrarga, in Casablanca’s southern suburbs, was detained on April 18, 2010. Wafae Raji, Janah’s wife, told Human Rights Watch that around midnight, she and her husband were awakened by loud knocking on their door. Janah rose to answer but by the time he arrived at the landing, he found three men in plainclothes who had already entered through an open skylight. Then a large number of men entered the house, handcuffed him, and searched the premises. Janah told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview from Salé Prison, “At home, when the police entered, they asked me where was Yassir Outmani [a co-accused in this case] and Ali—I don’t remember his family name—were. I told them, ‘They are not at my home.’ They asked me where I hid the money they had given me. I answered that I don’t have any money at home. They also asked me where I had hid explosives. They said that I had hosted Ali and Yassir for a week at my house.” That night, the men in plainclothes confiscated from the home a computer, some CDs, documents, and the keys to his car. Raji said that the men did not show any arrest or search warrant or explain why or where they taking her husband, but told her that he would be back in 30 minutes.

The next morning Raji discovered that someone—she presumes the plainclothesmen or their associates—had forced open the door of Janah’s olive oil store, which is adjacent to their residence.

Mohamed Janah, Abdelaziz’s father, said he contacted the police and the prosecutor’s office in Casablanca to inquire about his missing son, but learned nothing. The family had no information on Abdelaziz’s whereabouts until May 7, when a detainee in Salé Prison called Mohamed to say that Abdelaziz was currently with him in prison. On May 10, Mohamed went to Salé Prison and visited his son for the first time.

Mohamed Janah said that Abdelaziz told him that for nine days he had been interrogated and tortured while detained in an individual cell in an unknown location. Abdelaziz said in a telephone interview from Salé Prison, “When they were interrogating me, they again accused me of hiding the two men in my house. I answered that I don’t even know Ali and that Yassir and I have only a business relationship, and that he spent only one night at my house, after which I gave him a ride to visit the family of his fiancée.”[44] Mohamed said that his son recounted how at this location he was blindfolded and beaten with a wooden stick on his feet until he lost consciousness and required medical care. In an article about the case, the Moroccan weekly magazine Nichan quotes Abdelaziz Janah saying that his interrogators bound and beat his feet to the point where he lost sensation in them and was unable to walk for three days.[45] After nine days at this location, police held Janah for ten days at the headquarters of the National Brigade of the Judiciary Police (BNPJ) in the Maârif neighborhood of Casablanca. The police then presented Janah before an investigating judge, who remanded him to pretrial detention in Salé Prison. Janah told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview that he signed the statement prepared for him by the police at Maârif because he could not read well enough to understand it and believed he had no real choice in the matter.[46]

Janah said that he did not see a lawyer during the two and-a-half weeks he spent in custody before seeing a judge.[47] This was not Janah’s first experience in detention, as the authorities had detained and questioned him for seven days in 2003 before releasing him without charge.[48]

Mehdi Meliani is a 22-year-old resident of Casablanca who attends engineering school in the city of Mohammedia.

Abderrahman Meliani, Mehdi’s father, said in an interview that his son went out to a mosque to pray on March 26, 2010 and never came back. The father said that he filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office four days after his son’s disappearance but never received a response. The police never came to the family home to inform them of Mehdi’s whereabouts, to ask questions, or to conduct a search.

Mehdi Meliani said in a telephone interview from Salé Prison that when he left a café that day around noon or 12:30 p.m., four men wearing plainclothes approached him in a car and asked him to come with them because someone had filed a complaint against him for a bounced check. They said they were police but did not provide ID to prove it and showed no warrant. Meliani said later that he has no checkbook and thought at the time that the police had erred. He got into their car, thinking they were going to the police station but discovered instead that they were driving him out of Casablanca.

Forty days after Mehdi Meliani “disappeared,” he called his family from Salé Prison. In an interview he gave to Nichan magazine, Meliani said that the men in plainclothes who drove him from Casablanca took the highway toward Rabat, passing Mohammedia, Bouznika, and Skhirat—the town on the coastal road before Témara—before blindfolding him. This suggested to him that the destination was Témara.

Mehdi told his father that he had been detained in Témara in an individual cell. [49] Meliani said the interrogators there questioned him but did not torture him, and promised that he would soon be released. He told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview from Salé Prison:

When in Témara, I was asked about jihadism. I replied by asking them to define the term. So they asked me if I like the jihadists. I answered simply that I sympathize with those fighting the Jews in Palestine. Then they asked me about Salah Nachat [a co-accused], and if he ever talked to me about jihadism or asked me to join jihadists or to travel with him to Somalia. I answered that the only relationship I have with Salah is that he is my cousin, and I have never talked with him about any plan to travel. I don’t even have a passport. [50]

Meliani told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview from prison that he was held from March 26 to April 26 in a secret facility in what he presumed to be Témara, and from April 26 to May 6 in the jail at the Maârif station of the Judiciary Police, after which he saw an investigating judge, who remanded him to pre-trial detention in Salé Prison. [51]

Younes Zarli, a Casablanca resident born in 1980, is married to an Italian woman. He had planned to settle in Italy, but the Italian authorities expelled him three times because, Zarli says, his two brothers are allegedly connected to “terrorist groups.”[52] On September 15, 2006, a Moroccan court had convicted Zarli himself of terrorism-related activities and sentenced him to two years in prison, Amnesty International reported. An appeals court lowered his sentence to ten months because he was acquitted of most charges, with the exception of forging documents and making false statements.[53]

Zohra Sahib, Zarli’s mother, said that on April 11, 2010, a man appeared outside their home and asked their house cleaner, who was inside at the window, if Younes was at home. When the house cleaner answered that he was at home, the man asked her to call him. Younes went out to see who was asking about him. He did not return.

Zarli, in a telephone interview from Salé Prison, said that co-accused Yassir Outmani was the man who invited him out of his house on April 11 to talk. When Outmani and Zarli had walked the short distance from Zarli’s home in the Bernoussi neighborhood to the Avenue Harti, men in plainclothes intercepted them and placed them into cars, without stating that they were police or providing a warrant or a motive for their arrest, or revealing where they were taking them. [54]

Younes Zarli told Human Rights Watch in a telephone interview from Salé Prison that he suspects that Témara was his destination because he could see a bit while en route from Casablanca since the men in plainclothes had covered his head with his jacket rather than blindfolding him. At one point, Zarli said, he glimpsed a yellow sign announcing New Avenue Mohammed VI in Témara.

Zarli said that upon his arrival at Témara, agents stripped him naked and beat him repeatedly as they questioned him. He said they asked him about his relationship with Saïd Ziouani—another detainee apparently considered to be part of the same group—and whether Zarli had been planning to emigrate illegally to Europe and then to Afghanistan. Zarli said that he had no need to emigrate illegally since he had a visa valid for travel to Italy to attend his own appeals hearing against his deportation from that country.

Zarli said he signed a statement that police drafted for him on May 3, 2010, only after the police threatened to return him to interrogation if he refused. He said he saw a lawyer for the first time only after he signed the police statement, the day before he was presented to the investigating judge.

Sahib said that her son told her when she visited him in prison that he had spent 15 days in Témara and then 12 days in custody at the Judiciary Police headquarters in Maârif, before being remanded to Salé Prison.

Anouar Aljabri is a Casablanca resident born in 1973.

Hind Aljabri, Anouar’s sister, told Human Rights Watch that around 3:30 a.m. on April 29, 2010, she responded to a knock on their door. When she opened it, nine men in plainclothes entered the house without seeking permission. They said they were police but showed no identification or warrant to search or arrest, and did not explain why they had come. They asked for Aljabri, and when Hind indicated his room, they went over and handcuffed him. They searched the room and confiscated cassettes, religious books and papers, and left with Aljabri. Hind said that the men told her that her brother had broken no laws and that they would free him after asking him some questions. But it was not until May 7, nine days later, that the family had news of Anouar, when they learned that he was in Salé Prison.

Aljabri told Human Rights Watch that he spent eight days in Maârif police headquarters, where the police questioned him. Anouar said that during interrogation the police slapped and insulted him each time his answers displeased them. He also said that the agents threatened to detain his mother if he did not cooperate. Anouar said, “I was asked if [co-accused] Yassir Outmani helped me to set up a commercial project and I said no. I was asked about [co-accused] Salah Nachat and if he had talked to me about a plan to emigrate, and I denied this, too. I told them I had no relationship with those guys.”

Aljabri said that he signed without reading a statement prepared for him by the police at Maârif, without reading it, before he was transferred to Salé Prison. Aljabri said he signed it because it made no difference: in his view, it would contain what the police wanted whether he signed or not. He said that he did not see a lawyer during his time in pre-arraignment custody.

Aljabri added that he had previously been detained in April 2002 in Syria for three months before Syrian authorities delivered him to the Moroccan intelligence services, which took him to Témara in July 2002. He knew that he was at Témara, he said, because he could hear lions roaring at the nearby zoo, and also guns being fired at a shooting range.[55] He said he spent seven months there before being released without charge.[56]

The police detained him again for nine days in May 2003 in Casablanca and then released him again without charge. In December 2005, Aljabri was arrested, convicted of membership in a terrorist group and served a four-year sentence. He had been free only five months before his latest arrest, in April 2010.

Yassir Outmani is a Casablanca resident and second-year law student born in 1980.

In a telephone interview from Salé Prison, Outmani said he was abducted on the bustling Avenue Harti in Casablanca on April 11, 2010, after paying a visit to Younes Zarli, who lives nearby (see above).

Outmani’s mother, Najat Bensa ïd, said that the f amily had no information on his whereabouts until May 7, when they learned he was in Salé Prison. Bensaïd said she filed no complaint because when she did so after her son’s previous arrest in November 2005, she received no response. Yassir was convicted that year of planning to fight in Iraq and was sentenced to three years in prison.

Outmani described events that occurred shortly before his abduction:

I worked with a man named Ali Sejlmassi at his pharmacy. One day the concierge told me that four persons had come the day before and asked about Ali and me. Because I have been already detained, I knew that they were police, so I didn’t return to work. My father went to the police station, presented my ID, and asked if there was a warrant against me. He was told that there was no warrant. So I knew that those who were looking for me were with the intelligence service and not the police. When I was abducted, they asked me about Ali and if I knew that he had sent money to Afghanistan. I told them that during the period when Ali is accused of sending money to Afghanistan—the summer of 2008—I was still in prison. They later tried to tell me that I was trying to go into hiding to avoid the police, but I replied that they could find me simply by coming to my address. They are accusing me of funding terrorists: this is what I gathered from the questions that the investigating judge asked me.[57]

Outmani told Human Rights Watch that the men who had detained him drove him to Témara, which he said he recognized from having previously been imprisoned there. Outmani said that this time he was confined to an individual cell and that his interrogators beat him on his feet with a chain encased in a plastic tube (a technique known as “al falaqa”), suspended him by his limbs in the “airplane” position (“tayara”), poured cold water on him with the air conditioner running, and threatened to sodomize him with a bottle and to bring his sister into the prison.

Outmani said police initially refused his request to see a lawyer but then told him that they had called his attorney. But no lawyer ever came to see him during his four weeks in pre-arraignment police custody, he said.

After 16 days in secret detention, Outmani said he was transferred to BNPJ headquarters in Maârif, where he spent 11 days. Outmani, the son of a lawyer, said that the police in Maârif refused his request to read the written statement they had prepared for his signature, so he declined to sign it. Later that day, he said, they threatened to subject him to practices that he said would “harm my dignity.” They told him that even Moustapha Mouâtassim and Mohamed Amine Regala—leaders of small political parties charged in “the Belliraj affair” (see below)—had signed their own statements without reading them. [58]

The investigative judge sent Outmani to pre-trial detention in Salé Prison.

Salah Nachat, 39 years old anda resident of Mediouna, a suburb southeast of Casablanca, was detained on March 22, 2010, in front of his house. He told Human Rights Watch that four men in plainclothes approached and one asked him if he owns a scooter. When he replied that he did, they told him that someone he had hit while riding it had filed a complaint, and so he must accompany them to the police station. He told them that he had not ridden his scooter in more than a week and had never hit anyone. They insisted and took him away in an unmarked car. They never showed him a warrant or any identification.

Nachat said the men in plainclothes drove him to a place he presumed was Témara, although he could not be sure because they blindfolded him while en route. Nachat said he spent 36 days at this place. He says that agents there beat him on the bottom of his feet with a hard object (he is not sure whether it was wood or metal) until he lost consciousness. During the interrogation, the agents asked Nachat about his relationship with three men, including co-accused Boualem Rachid.[59]

After 36 days, the authorities transferred Nachat to BNPJ headquarters in Maârif. Nachat spent 10 days in Maârif, where he was questioned about co-accused Anouar Aljabri, among other topics. He answered that he has a business relationship with him and nothing more. He also told Human Rights Watch that the police brought Aljabri to confront him in Maârif and the latter also stated that the relationship of the two men was commercial only.

Nachat signed the statement prepared for him by the police at Maârif. He said the police did not allow him to read it and he was weak from having been deprived of food and sleep for many hours. Nachat told Human Rights Watch that when he was sent from Maârif to his first court appearance on May 6, he informed the investigating judge that he had signed his police statement without reading it, and also that he had spent the last 24 hours without sleep or food. He also said he told the investigating judge that he had been detained in Témara. The judge placed him in pretrial detention in Salé Prison. The following day his family learned of his whereabouts for the first time since his arrest. [60]

Abderrahim Lahjouli is a Casablanca merchant who sells cases for compact discs. Born in 1972, Lahjouli is married and the father of two children.

Lahjouli said in a telephone interview from Salé Prison that while he was at work in the Derb Ghalaf neighborhood on March 30, three men in plainclothes came to him and asked him if his name was Lahjouli. Then they told him to put on his jacket and bring his ID, explaining that they would question him for half an hour and then let him go. Lahjouli said that the men never said they were police, but when they asked him to bring ID he assumed they were police and wanted to talk to him about the merchandise he sells. [61]

Lahjouli’s family said they did not know anything about his whereabouts until May 7, when he called Brahim, his brother, from Salé Prison. Lahjouli told his brother that he had spent 28 days in Témara in an individual cell before being brought to Maârif, where he spent 11 more days before being transferred to Salé Prison. According to Brahim Lahjouli, Abderrahim said his interrogators threatened but did not physically torture him. [62] Brahim said that his brother reported that police accused him of failing to provide information to authorities about a French citizen of Moroccan origin named Ahmed Sahnouni, whom Moroccan authorities were reportedly seeking because of his links to this alleged network. [63] On April 30, French authorities arrested an Ahmed Sahnouni in Paris and charged him with recruiting jihadists via the Internet to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia, Le Parisien reported. [64]

The seven accused men who spoke to Human Rights Watch claim they belong to no terrorist cell and that they never met the majority of their fellow suspects before they found themselves together in pretrial detention in Salé Prison. They said they believed they were arrested because of links with one or two of their co-accused. For example, Younes Zarli was accused of helping fellow suspect Saïd Ziouani to emigrate illegally. Mehdi Meliani is a cousin of fellow suspect Salah Nachat. Yassir Outmani worked with a pharmacist accused of sending money to Afghanistan.

As this report went to press, the investigating judge was still examining the case, and the suspects remained in pre-trial detention. No trial date had been set.