Former Moroccan PM Benkirane Advocates for Implementing Death Penalty

"I salute the Moroccan justice system and the Moroccan legislator because they have maintained the death penalty, and I think it should be applied. Why do we imprison the condemned person for life, torture him and torture ourselves? The verse says: ’It is in retaliation that you will have the preservation of life, O you who are endowed with intelligence, so that you may attain piety,’" said the former senior official during a meeting with leaders of the National Union of Labor. Together, they debated the issue of the abolition of the death penalty, which is currently the subject of lively controversy.

"No one has the right to forgive the one who killed six people from the same family. It is rather the right of the victims’ families, if they accept the blood money (financial compensation), for example, that is Islam and logic," he added, thus referring to the collective murder that occurred on February 6 in the Errahma district of Salé.