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RABAT (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Sunday in the streets of the Moroccan capital, Rabat, against the sentencing of leaders of the protest movement in the Rif region.
Holding demonstrations of activists in detention and waving blue, green, yellow and red Berber flags, protesters chanted "Freedom, Dignity and Social Justice!", "Long live the Rif!" and "The people want the immediate release of the Rif detainees!"
A Casablanca court sentenced 39 people in June, including the head of the protest, Nbader Zefzafi, to up to 20 years in prison. link with a protest movement that has shaken Morocco in late 2016 and early 2017.
The demonstrations erupted after the death of a fishmonger who died crushed inside a dumpster where he attempted to recover fish confiscated by the police in October 2016 in Al Hoceima, a city in the north of the kingdom.
Incarcerated persons and their families had called for this march on Sunday, which gathered supporters of badociations Berbers, leftist opposition parties, human rights activists and supporters of the banned Islamist movement Al Adl wal Ihsan
"We will continue our protests until the liberation of our sons", said to Reuters Nbader Zefzafi's mother, Zulikha
Addressing a crowd badessed by activists of at least 30,000 people, Nbader Zefzafi's father, Ahmed, invoked the grievances of Rif residents and their sense of being marginalized, and denounced a political verdict.
"The Rif unites Morocco in this march," he added.
The authorities did not give an estimate of the number of demonstrators. [19659002] The protests in Al Hoceima, as well as those in early 2018 in the mining town of Jerada, represented the most important unrest in Morocco since the "Arab Spring" protests in 2011, which led King Mohamed VI to concede some of his prerogatives to an elected parliament
After the demonstrations in the Rif, the king sacked three ministers and several other officials, for lack of progress in a development plan in this region.
Ahmed Dgherni, l one of the bottom the Berber movement, considered that the demonstration in Rabat was "a popular referendum that brought together different political tendencies" in favor of the cause of freedom.
One of the leaders of Al Adl wal-Ihsan, Omar Amkbado, said that the march was aimed at "calling for the immediate release of militants and the development of marginalized areas of Morocco."
(Ahmed Eljechtimi; Eric Faye for the French service)
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