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His Moroccan father died in 1977; nearly 50 years later, he is still searching for where the money went

Saturday 22 August 2026, by Laila

Mohamed is preparing complaints in Morocco and Belgium. His aim is to reconstruct what happened to any insurance payments, social benefits and inheritance funds after the death of his father, a Moroccan worker who died in 1977 following an accident in France.

At 51, Mohamed is tracing an administrative trail nearly half a century old. He is looking for documents in Belgium, archives in France and possible financial records in Morocco. His story is reported by La DH, which collected his testimony.

His investigation is divided into three parts. In Belgium, he is trying to identify his father’s employers and the rights connected to around fifteen years of work. In France, he wants to retrieve the accident file and find out whether an insurance company compensated the family. In Morocco, he is seeking to determine whether an estate was opened and whether funds or property were managed in the heirs’ names.

Another Moroccan family has also been waging a comparable battle for more than 50 years to recover compensation linked to the death of an MRE.

On Bladi.net : Belgium Survivor’s Pension Morocco: Rights and Conditions

Ahmed B., Mohamed’s father, belonged to the first generation of Moroccan workers who settled in Belgium. On 28 July 1977, while returning from Morocco with his family, he was involved in an accident on national road 10, near Bordeaux. He did not die immediately: after approximately two and a half months in a coma, he died on 3 October.

He left behind a wife and young children. Mohamed’s mother spoke Arabic and was unfamiliar with the workings of the Belgian administration. Yet she had to deal with a case involving an accident in France, a professional career in Belgium and possible family interests in Morocco.

It is this lack of an overall picture that his son is now trying to fill in. After fifteen years of work in Belgium, Ahmed must necessarily have left administrative records. Mohamed particularly wants to establish whether certain social rights were claimed after his death. The agreement between the two countries still allows today, under certain conditions, a survivor’s pension linked to a career in Belgium to be paid in Morocco.

The possibility of an estate in Morocco

The most sensitive part of the case concerns Morocco. Mohamed is trying to find out whether an estate was arranged there and what role certain family members played in the procedures following his father’s disappearance.

He suspects that sums linked to Ahmed’s rights may have been directed to Morocco while his mother and the children were living in difficult conditions in Belgium. He is also questioning the appearance of family assets in the Rif, including land, real estate, olive trees and wells.

At this stage, however, nothing publicly establishes that these assets were financed with money that should have gone to the widow or the children, nor can it even confirm what sums were actually paid after the death. Mohamed is specifically seeking the documents needed to distinguish facts from his suspicions.

Inheritance cases between the two countries remain complex: an inheritance case between Belgium and Morocco may require procedures and checks on both sides, particularly when property and heirs are spread across several states.

On Bladi.net : Inheritance Morocco MRE: Tax formalities and land registry requirements

France is the third piece of the puzzle. Mohamed wants to retrieve the reports relating to the 1977 accident, identify the driver and the vehicles involved, and check which insurance companies were involved. Fifty years after the events, preserving these archives is now an additional difficulty.

His investigation therefore does not begin with an inheritance whose amount he already knows. The opposite is true: Mohamed still does not know whether any money was paid, how much, to whom or in which country. That is precisely what he wants to establish by approaching the authorities in Morocco and Brussels today.

Nearly half a century after Ahmed’s death, his son is thus attempting to reconstruct, document by document, what no one had been able to explain to him when he was a child.