Polisario Leader’s Secret Hospital Admission in Spain Sparks Diplomatic Controversy

El País returns to the hospitalization of the separatist leader and makes new revelations. According to the Spanish newspaper, the Algerian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sabri Boukadoum, had addressed a request for assistance to Spain on this subject, explaining that Brahim Ghali is "suffering from Covid-19 and in mortal danger". The Algerian Foreign Minister had traveled to Madrid on March 29.

This request had been examined at the "highest level" before being accepted "for strictly humanitarian reasons," diplomatic sources said. The same newspaper specifies that the head of the Polisario Front had traveled to Spain on board a medicalized aircraft from the Algerian presidency, and holds an Algerian diplomatic passport.

Since the hospitalization of the Polisario boss in a hospital in Logroño, not far from Zaragoza, under the borrowed name of Mohamed Ben Battouche, an Algerian national, relations between Spain and Morocco are once again strained. Arancha González Laya, Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation of Spain, has meanwhile reaffirmed that relations between the two countries are at their "best" and that the kingdom and the Iberian peninsula are not just neighbors but "two privileged partners". Her counterpart, Nasser Bourita, has denounced the "à la carte relationship" that Madrid maintains with Rabat.