Morocco reburials anger rights groups

Monday, December 12, 2005; Posted: 10:24 p.m. EST (03:24 GMT)

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CASABLANCA, Morocco (Reuters) -- Moroccan authorities have unearthed a mass grave holding the remains of up to 100 people killed 24 years ago in anti-government riots and re-buried them, angering relatives and rights activists.

The excavation of the grave, part of a drive to lift the lid on past rights abuses, and the reburial of the remains in individual graves may have tampered with evidence needed to sue those who carried out the killings, families and activists said on Monday.

Witnesses and rights activists said the authorities dug up the mass grave at Casablanca's main fire station on Saturday night and reburied the remains in separate graves on a nearby lot.

Reports of the operation appeared in newspapers Monday.

Families and journalists were not allowed to visit the site of the mass grave and the new tombs.

The dead were among some 1,000 people killed in anti-government riots in Casablanca on June 20, 1981, when riot police fired into a crowd protesting against food price rises, according to human rights groups.

"Move out here! We do not want people here and the parents of the dead to come here and make trouble," a plainclothes policeman told a reporter who tried to scale a wall to see the mass grave and the nearby plot where the new graves were dug.

"About 100 bodies were found and reburied," a security source near the scene told Reuters. Other sources, including rights activists, put the number of dead at between 80 and 100.

'Years of lead'

At the time, the government put the death toll at 66. Human rights groups said the government buried the dead in at least seven mass graves scattered across the city of 5 million people, including the one unearthed at the fire station.

The discovery is part of an unprecedented truth-seeking process in Morocco after the reform-minded King Mohammed ordered the independent Equity and Reconciliation Commission last year to investigate human rights abuses.

The abuses over more than four decades up to 1999, during the rule of the late King Hassan, were known as the "years of lead" when many dissidents and coup plotters were killed, tortured and abducted.

The commission formally ended its investigations last month and submitted to Mohammed a report whose results have not yet been made public.

Three nongovernmental human rights organizations and a group uniting families of the dead criticized the authorities for their treatment of the bodies in the mass grave.

"We consider the way the authorities handled the digging up of the mass grave and the removal of the remains will tamper with the evidence and damage the remains of the dead," they said in a statement.

"We demand the prosecution of those responsible for the crime of killing our loved sons and daughters, buried in that mass grave. We consider this a crime against humanity."

The Moroccan Human Rights Association and the Justice and Truth Forum voiced similar concerns and backed their demands.