A village near Taroudant, in southern Morocco, was the scene of a terrifying altercation. As Le Point reported, a group of young Belgian girls volunteered on a construction site, in liaison with a local association.
The girls were violently attacked because of their dress code. Because they wearing shorts, they received death threats.
A 26-year-old schoolteacher had called for beheading the Belgian girls echoing the assassination of two Scandinavian tourists beheaded in 2018 by Moroccans on behalf of the Islamic State group. Two young women were decapitated last December in the High Atlas, southern Morocco.
Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, a 24-year-old Danish student, and her friend Maren Ueland, a 28-year-old Norwegian, were killed by beheading while camping on an isolated site in the High Atlas, a mountainous region in southern Morocco.
The first suspect, Abdessamad Ejjoud, a 25-year-old street vendor, had confessed to organising the murderous expedition with two companions, Younes Ouaziyad, a 27-year-old carpenter, and Rachid Afatti, 33, who had filmed the beheading scene. The three men had remained unmoved when they were sentenced to death last month.
In a statement relayed by Le Point, the Moroccan Security Service (DGSN) said that the individual was arrested on Monday for “having published a hate message on Facebook”.
The man will be prosecuted for “incitement to terrorist acts”, according to the DGSN. He apparently lives in the north of the country.
The young volunteers work in liaison with a local association, as explained by participants. “People are very kind and very friendly, I love Morocco!” said Luna, one of the young people interviewed in a video.
Most of the comments on the association’s video, however, applaud the “dedication” of these volunteers who “came to do the job in the place of local officials”.
But other reactions were not so friendly. “Since when have Europeans done bathing suits?” Ali El Asri, a member of the Islamist party (PJD, head of the government coalition) indignantly said on his Facebook page, provoking negative reactions that he described as “secular terrorism”.
As Le Point pointed out, Morocco, anxious to assert its culture of tolerance, regularly arrives at the top of the table in the rankings devoted to dangerous countries for women touring alone.
