Moroccan journalist Ali Lmrabet freed three days after Tangier airport arrest

Morocco’s public prosecutor has confirmed that Ali Lmrabet, a well-known Moroccan reporter and critic of the authorities, is no longer in police detention, three days after officers held him on defamation allegations.

Lmrabet, 66 and a major voice in the country’s independent media, was taken into custody at Tangier’s airport on Sunday when he landed from Spain, his home for several years. He walked free on Wednesday following public appeals from press-freedom organisations, among them Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

“I only practice journalism. I don’t engage in politics,” he told RSF after his release. “The fact that I practice independent journalism seems to bother a lot of people.”

Prosecutors say the file against him has not been closed. They are examining what they describe as “defamatory and insulting remarks against individuals and institutions.” RSF praised the decision to let him go and urged Moroccan officials to scrap the case. It is not yet clear whether he may travel abroad again.

Earlier in his career, Lmrabet ran the weekly Demain Magazine and the Arabic title Doumane inside Morocco. Both papers were shut in 2003 after a conviction that included insulting the king. He received a three-year prison term but left jail in early 2004 under a royal pardon. From April 2005 to April 2015 he was barred from practising journalism in Morocco following another defamation conviction tied to remarks about people displaced from Western Sahara — territory mostly held by Morocco and contested by the Algeria-backed Polisario Front.

Separately, supporters said outspoken rapper and filmmaker Mehdi El Youbi appeared in a Casablanca court on Wednesday without legal counsel, because Moroccan lawyers were on strike. Officers arrested him Monday night in Casablanca after he was stopped from flying back to France, where he has lived since 2017. Friends and relatives link the detention to his political songs and social-media activity. They say pressure on opponents has intensified since a nationwide Gen Z protest wave emerged last year.

“We cannot treat this escalation as business as usual,” the Association of Maghrebi Workers in France said in a statement on Wednesday. “We cannot get used to arrests. We cannot consider repression a normal form of governance.”