The King of Morocco Mohammed VI has pardoned 1,500 prisoners to mark the Muslim Eid ul-Adha celebration, according to the justice ministry.
The measure marking the festival that runs from June 6-10 was part of the country’s wider “Rehabilitation” programme designed to rehabilitate and reintegrate those who passed several rounds of scrutiny and were deemed fit to re-join society.
The process could take more than a decade to complete and resembled similar programmes implemented by Arab Gulf monarchies, including Saudi Arabia’s, for re-education and re-socialisation. Some are former terrorists.
In the wake of the War on Terror, Arab countries had found that providing counselling and a social structure to former fighters was a more efficient way to tackle ideological radicalism than punishment and discrimination.
One of the released prisoners was Abdelkader Belliraj who, along with 30 others, had been convicted of extremism and terrorism related crimes.
Belliraj was a decades long-criminal operating in Belgium and then Morocco until his arrest in 2008, although his political activities mostly involved Morocco and the Arab world.
