Ben Barka case: sixty years after his disappearance, the investigation continues

Bachir Ben Barka was questioned for two hours on Thursday by the new judge in charge of the investigations, conducted in Paris, in an investigation that has been running since 1975 and is presented as the oldest in France.

"We feel this magistrate is truly involved. In a year, she has immersed herself in the case and she wants to conduct investigations," Bachir Ben Barka told AFP after the hearing where he appeared as a civil party.

"The passage of time encourages the rereading of pieces in a new light," noted the man who was heard by a judge for the first time in 1975 and for the last time in 2019.

Mystery still hangs over the Ben Barka case, sixty years after his kidnapping. How did this great independence figure die? Where is his body?

A leading figure in the anti-colonialist movement and opponent of King Hassan II, Mehdi Ben Barka was abducted on October 29, 1965, in front of the Lipp brasserie in Paris. Sentenced to death in absentia by the Moroccan courts, Ben Barka, 45, never returned.

A first trial in 1967 had already established that the kidnapping had been planned by the Moroccan secret services with the complicity of French police and criminals. But the case had not been fully solved.

"It is proven that Israeli services were involved in the disappearance, and that French and American services were aware of it in advance," maintains Bachir Ben Barka.

Above all, "the cynicism of the Moroccan and French authorities, who are playing for time, angers me," he insists. Bachir Ben Barka denounces international letters rogatory to Morocco "without response." Or even the "charade" played, according to him, by the French state, when the government announced the declassification of more than 80 documents... when they "were already in the file." "I think they're waiting for all the witnesses to be dead," he lamented.

Arrest warrants

As for the suspects, of the five arrest warrants issued in 2007 by a Parisian investigating judge, only "two" are still valid (the one targeting General Hosni Benslimane, head of the Royal Gendarmerie at the time of the events, and the one targeting Miloud Tounsi, alias Larbi Chtouki, a presumed member of the commando) because "the other three people are deceased."