The AN judge will hear on October 24 witness of the alleged torture of the Polisario Front of Brahim Ghali

He is the last pending witness in the case and appears at the request of the Saharawi activist Fadel Breica

MADRID, 14 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz will take a statement on October 24 from Abba Bouzeid, an alleged witness of the alleged torture that the Saharawi activist Fadel Breica would have suffered at the hands of the Polisario Front, the liberation movement led by Brahim Ghali.

Legal sources have confirmed to Europa Press that the head of the Central Investigating Court Number 5 has finally set a date for the procedure by which last June he agreed to extend the investigation against the Polisario for another six months. That summons had been successively postponed due to problems with obtaining a visa to enter Spain.

Bouzeid, whose summons Breica himself requested, would have been detained in the same prison as the activist and could account for the alleged human rights violations for which the Polisario leader is being investigated.

In the lawsuit, Breica accuses Ghali of crimes of illegal detention, torture and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in 2019 in the Saharawi refugee camps of Tindouf. According to him, when he arrived there, Polisario agents threatened him to leave but, far from doing so, he organized protests, being arrested and transferred to clandestine detention centers where he allegedly suffered beatings and electric shocks, among other practices.

In his statement before Pedraz --on June 29, 2021--, Breica insisted that he was tortured for six months in a secret Polisario Front prison, pointing to Ghali as the person most responsible. In addition, he denounced that he would not be the only victim, maintaining that torture would be a common practice of the Polisario Front among Saharawi refugees, while reproaching Algeria for allowing this in its territory.

The Breica complaint is the only one that is still alive against the head of the Polisario in the National Court. Pedraz archived the one formulated by the Saharawi Association for the Defense of Human Rights (ASADEDH) against Ghali and 27 other people for crimes of genocide in relation to acts allegedly committed against members of the Saharawi people between 1975 and 1990.

Ghali declared in the AN on June 1, 2021 to deny any involvement in the human rights violations of which he is blamed. His defense then argued that, as Minister of Defense of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), he was dedicated "exclusively" to the war against Morocco, so "he was oblivious to any detention center", where the torture would have occurred. .

That June 1, Pedraz rejected the precautionary measures requested by the complainants --provisional detention and withdrawal of his passport-- seeing no evidence that Ghali had committed any crime, so that same morning the leader of the Polisario Front left for Algeria .

For his part, the head of the Investigating Court Number 7 of Zaragoza, Rafael Lasala, continues to investigate Ghali's entry into Spain on April 18, 2021, but now focused on the false passport that was used to also identify the president of the SADR. upon arrival at the San Pedro de Logroño hospital, where he was admitted for coronavirus.