NEW YORK - Human Rights Watch (HRW) has denounced the alleged torture by Moroccan police of seven prominent members of the country's leading Islamist association, the organisation said in a statement.
The members of Al Adl wal Ihssane (Justice and Spirituality) were arrested in dawn raids by armed police on their homes in Fes on June 28 and have been held in pretrial detention since, HRW said in its report published Wednesday.
"When the men first saw their lawyers on July 1, they told them that during the previous three days, police separated the men into individual cells - naked, blindfolded and without food - and beat them and threatened with rape. The police also allegedly (...) sodomised some of them with pens and shocked some of them with electricity," the report said.
All seven said they were forced on July 1 to sign statements they were not allowed to read.
"A warrantless search-and-arrest operation at dawn suggests that justice is not high on the agenda," HRW said, pointing out that Justice and Spirituality is the north African kingdom's largest religion-based movement and strongest opposition force.
The seven men were arrested after a Fes lawyer and former member of Justice and Spirituality, Mohamed El Ghazi, complained that they had abducted him on May 21, stripped him and forced him to confess to being an informant for the security services.
The seven have been accused of "membership in an unauthorised association," which HRW said was a charge that does not exist in Moroccan law but is used by prosecutors against members of Justice and Spirituality and other associations authorities seek to undermine.
HRW named the seven as: Bouali Mnaouer, a pharmacist; Hicham Sabbah, a civil servant; Azeddine Slimani, a high school teacher; Hicham Didi Houari, a civil servant; Abdellah Bella, a secondary school teacher; Tarik Mahla, a nursing school instructor; and Mohamed Ibn Abdelmaoula Slimani Tlemcani, a professor at a teachers' college.
"This case seems to fit the pattern of Moroccan authorities harassing Justice and Spirituality," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North African director at HRW.
"They need to dispel that impression by conducting an impartial investigation of the defendants' torture complaints and granting a fair trial," Whitson added.
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