Moroccan journalist gets suspended sentence for 'criminal defamation'
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Version 0 of 1. A Moroccan journalist has received a four-month suspended prison sentence and been ordered to pay damages for criminal defamation, reports the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Hamid el-Mehdaoui, editor of the independent news website Badil, was prosecuted after running an article about the head of the general directorate of national security, Abdellatif el-Hammouchi. It concerned the death of an activist, Karim Lachqar (aka Lashqar), in May 2014 while he was in police custody. A series of Badil reports accused the police of torturing Lachqar. El-Mehdaoui was put on trial in Casablanca alongside his source for the story, Rabea Al-Ablak, who claimed to have witnessed Lachqar’s arrest. He is not a journalist but was charged with “false reporting” and defamation. Both el-Mehdaoui and al-Ablak were ordered to pay combined damages of 100,000 Moroccan dirhams (£6,550) to el-Hammouchi. In addition, el-Mehdaoui was ordered to pay a fine of 6,000 dirhams to the Moroccan state. The sentence follows a civil defamation case in Morocco last week, also reported by CPJ, in which a court ordered the news website Goud to pay 500,000 dirhams (£32,750) in damages to the Moroccan king’s private secretary, Mounir El-Majidi. CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa programme coordinator, Sherif Mansour, said: “We see a pattern in which the [Moroccan] government targets the resources of media outlets in order to render them silent and discourage critical journalism. We call on Moroccan authorities to put an end to this tactic.” El-Mehdaoui has told CPJ that he faces at least two other court cases on charges related to his journalism. Source: CPJ |