Imprisoned editor Ali Lmrabet threatened in his cell

During a court appearance today in Rabat, jailed newspaper editor Ali Lmrabet said two men visited him yesterday in his cell and threatened to accuse him of trafficking in hashish within the prison where he is serving a three-year sentence for "insulting the person of the king." Addressing the journalists present in the courtroom, who included many correspondents for the Spanish press, Lmrabet said his two visitors warned him that, if he continued writing articles for the foreign news media from prison, they would hide large amounts of hashish among his personal effects while he was outside his cell. Since being imprisoned on 13 May, Lmrabet has had several articles published in the foreign news media including the French daily Le Monde and the magazine Courrier International. His appearance in court today was unrelated to the case for which he is currently in jail. It stems from a charge in 2001 that he published "false information disturbing or likely to disturb the peace" in his now banned weekly Demain Magazine. He was convicted and sentenced on 21 November 2001 to four months in prison and a fine of 30,000 dirhams (about 3,000 euros) but the Rabat prosecutor's office immediately appealed. The appeal was to have been heard today, but it was postponed at the request of Lmrabet's lawyers, because they had not been given copies of all the documents in the case file. The official reason for the 2001 charge was an article headlined, "Skhirat Palace said to be up for sale." But in Lmrabet's view, the real reason was the publication in the 27 October 2001 issue of Demain Magazine of extracts from a book about Morocco entitled "The Last King" by Le Monde reporter Jean-Pierre Tuquoi. As a result of the 2001 conviction, Demain Magazine was banned for a month.