Morocco detains exiled journalist Ali Lmrabet at Tangier airport on vague charges, drawing rights-group censure
Dissident journalist Ali Lmrabet was detained at Tangier airport on his first return to Morocco in five years and transferred to a police unit in Casablanca for interrogation over vaguely defined accusations.
Arrest on arrival
Ali Lmrabet, a 66-year-old Moroccan journalist with French nationality who has lived in Barcelona for over 20 years, was detained on Sunday 12 July 2026 upon landing at Tangier airport. He had travelled from Barcelona for personal reasons, his first return to Morocco in five years. His wife, Laura Feliu, told Europa Press that Lmrabet called her around 7 p.m. to say he was being held at the Tangier prefecture. Later that night he was transferred roughly 300 km south to the National Brigade of the Judicial Police in Casablanca for interrogation. By late Monday morning he still did not know the precise charges he would face.
When they detained him, they told him the charges were linked to 'dissemination of false information and against Moroccan institutions'.
Vague accusations, judicial silence
The prosecution has offered no public statement. Moroccan judicial authorities did not respond to Reuters' request for comment, and when AFP approached the public prosecutor's office it declined to answer. Pro-government digital outlet Hespress reported on Monday that Lmrabet would face justice like any other citizen on criminal charges, citing defamation. One trigger may be a video published on his YouTube channel on 9 July in which he challenged the secretary general of the Party of Progress and Socialism, Nabil Benabdallah, over claims about a 2003 travel ban imposed on Lmrabet.
While Moroccan authorities arrest independent journalists, they protect police figures who celebrated the shooting and killing of GenZ protesters. Not one investigation has been opened and they remain protected.
A long arc of repression
Lmrabet was a pioneer of press openness at the start of Mohamed VI's reign, serving as editor-in-chief of the French-language weekly Le Journal. In 2003 he received a three-year prison sentence for "lèse-majesté" after publishing a cartoon showing an arm purportedly belonging to the king. His two satirical magazines, Demain magazine in French and Douman in Arabic, were shut down. He was pardoned in 2004 but banned from practising journalism in Morocco for ten years starting in 2005. He moved to Barcelona, married Spanish academic Laura Feliu, and raised two children who hold Spanish nationality. After the ban expired, Moroccan authorities attempted to revoke his Moroccan documentation; Lmrabet staged a hunger strike at the UN in Geneva and succeeded in recovering his papers.
Rights organisations react
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) demanded Lmrabet's immediate release on Monday, condemning the investigation as an attempt to silence critical voices. The independent Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) also called for his release and warned against turning press freedom disputes into criminal cases. Its statement described a context of mounting restrictions on independent media and a "tense relationship" between authorities and journalists who face repression, harassment, detention, and unjust sentences.
We express deep concern that this detention may be part of official policies aimed at suffocating independent journalists, particularly investigative ones, in an attempt to silence critical voices and undermine citizens' right to access information.
The group's intervention broke what El País described as a prevailing silence inside Morocco on the case.
A test for Madrid and Paris
Lmrabet's arrest places the governments of Spain and France in an awkward position. He holds French nationality and resides in Catalonia with his Spanish wife and children. El Confidencial noted that French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu was due to arrive in Rabat the following day, while El Mundo editorialised that the Spanish government's silence continues a pattern of concessions and muteness toward Rabat since Madrid's abrupt policy shift on Western Sahara. The paper argued that Spain has a "moral and political obligation" to demand guarantees for Lmrabet and to remind Morocco that no strategic partnership can be built on the persecution of journalists.
Deteriorating press freedom
The case arrives against a backdrop of sharply declining press freedom metrics in Morocco. RSF ranks the country 105th out of 180 nations. Freedom House places it 37 out of 100, classifying the kingdom as "partly free". A UNESCO Global Expression report labelled Morocco "restrictive" before upgrading that rating to "highly restrictive" from 2017 onward. The repression has intensified over the past year: security forces used excessive force to suppress nationwide GenZ212 protests in September 2025, and activists were charged with defamation, spreading false news, and threatening state security. Rights organisations say the pattern is consistent: criminal law is deployed to silence independent voices, while police personnel accused of violence against demonstrators face no investigation. El Mundo described Lmrabet's case as the latest face of a repressive drift in which freedom of expression is treated as a threat to stability.
