Moroccan Journalist Detained After Reporting on Smuggling in Tiznit

It all started with an article titled "Tiznit: "good" to legitimize the smuggling of subsidized products. The police and gendarmerie give up prosecuting smugglers," which the journalist had published on January 1 on Tizpress. On January 27, Moulay Lahcen Ouazzani of Sidi Ifni filed a complaint against the journalist Mohamed Boutaâm in his capacity as editor-in-chief of Tizpress, for "insults, slander and defamation" against his person and that of the Attorney General of the King in Agadir. In his complaint, the plaintiff notably accuses the journalist of attributing the nickname "boutzguit" (the arsonist in the Tashelhiyt dialect) to him in press articles dealing with "the real estate mafia in the Souss", reports TelQuel.

Following the dispatch of a warrant from the King’s Prosecutor to the judicial police of Tiznit, Mohamed Boutaâm was summoned on May 4. The journalist refused to answer questions focused on Moulay Lahcen Ouazzani’s complaint, as well as on "the urgent order of the president of the court of first instance to block the Tizpress site". The latter is related to another legal case concerning his site and eight other local news sites in the region including Tiznit news, Akhbar Aljanoub, Tafraout 24, MarocDaily, Tarbaouiat and Ifni news.

On Thursday, he appeared under arrest before the court of first instance of Tiznit, the request for his release having in the meantime been rejected. At the bar, he explained "never having wanted to evade the legal obligations to make his site compliant with the provisions of the law," said his lawyer Omar Daoudi, a member of the defense committee. "My client has never received the court’s decision so that he can appeal the blocking of his site, and await the final decision," he added.

Reacting to the accusation of "interference without title in public functions" under Article 380 of the Penal Code, Omar Daoudi argues that "the prosecution cannot accuse Mohamed today of passing himself off as a journalist, since he has still not received the decision to block his site". "365 out of 892 news sites declared with the courts of first instance were compliant with the requirements of the Press Code" at the end of 2019, recalled on Facebook, Mhamed Kheyi, former winner of the National Grand Prize for Electronic Journalism. In the event that the decision of the Tiznit prosecutor’s office to prosecute Mohamed Boutaâm would set a precedent at the national level, "we would have to arrest at least 580 Moroccans who have not made their site compliant! And add hundreds of unregistered ones," he assumes.

"The entire file was discussed on Thursday. There remains only the verdict which will be rendered next Monday," the journalist’s lawyer further explained.