Polisario Leader Summoned to Spanish Court Amid Torture Allegations

The noose is tightening around the Polisario leader. After health problems, Brahim Ghali will face legal problems. He and other influential members of the separatist movement will be heard by investigating judge Santiago Pedraz Gomez of Madrid. The hearing of Brahim Ghali and Sid Ahmed El Batal, a senior Polisario official stationed in Tindouf, will take place on May 5, and that of Bachir Mustapha Sayed, the leader’s special adviser, is scheduled for May 7, report Spanish media. The Spanish authorities have not, for the time being, communicated on the order.

This order follows a complaint filed by El Fadel Breika, a dissident of the front for "kidnapping, arbitrary detention and torture" in the Tindouf prisons, reports Le Desk. In 2020, he had participated in the 43rd session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva. On this occasion, he had denounced "the repression and the serious abuses committed by the torturers of the Polisario against the inhabitants of Tindouf under the passive gaze of the authorities of the host country, Algeria", and condemned "the silence of the so-called defenders of the Sahrawi people on the abuses and violations committed against the Sahrawis by the Polisario leaders, with the complicity of the Algerian security services to silence, by fire and blood, any dissonant voice to the said camps".

El Fadel Breika made these statements after his release from the Polisario prisons. In his testimony, this blogger and human rights activist said he and bloggers Mahmoud Zedan and Moulay Abba Bouzid had suffered "physical and psychological abuse for daring to denounce the serious human rights violations and the depravity of the separatist leaders as well as their exploitation of the misery of the camp populations to serve their personal interests" over a five-month period.

"My body still bears the scars of the injuries and the marks of the torture I suffered over the past five months of 2019 in the secret prisons run by the Polisario, with the blessing of the Algerian government," he further testified, before calling on the HRC and the international community "to put pressure on Algeria to assume its legal responsibility as the host country of the Sahrawi population on its territory in Tindouf".

Before the evacuation of Braham Ghali to Spain on April 21, the investigating judge of the 5th Court of the National Court in Madrid had issued an order on April 13. The Polisario leader had been urgently admitted to a hospital in Logroño, not far from Zaragoza, under the borrowed name of Mohamed Ben Battouche, of Algerian nationality. This hospitalization is at the origin of new tensions between Morocco and Spain. Nasser Bourita, Minister of Foreign Affairs, African Cooperation and Moroccans Residing Abroad, denounced the "à la carte relationship" that Madrid maintains with Rabat. The victims of the leader of the separatist movement are demanding, for their part, that justice be done.