The leader of the Polisario Front, hospitalized in Spain

The leader of the Polisario Front and president of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Brahim Gali, at a press conference in 2016 Sergio R Moreno / GTRES

The leader of the Polisario Front and president of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Rasd), Brahim Gali, 73, is hospitalized in Spain "for strictly humanitarian reasons", as confirmed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Gali has been admitted to a hospital in Logroño to be treated for covid under an assumed name, other sources specify.

The Rasd presidency issued a statement on Tuesday night stating that Gali has been "in treatment and health control for several days, as a result of his infection with the Covid-19 virus." The message, released by the official Sahrawi agency SPS, does not inform about where the president of the Rasd is, although it specifies that his state of health "is not a cause for concern" and has evolved well since his Coronavirus picture was confirmed.

According to the weekly

, which announced the news, Gali was admitted to the emergency room last Wednesday. The magazine did not speak of Covid-19 but of a "cancer in the digestive system" that Gali supposedly suffered from for several years. The magazine noted that Germany had refused to host the Rasd president. Germany was precisely the country to which the Algerian president, Abdelmayid Tebún, 74, was urgently transferred in October to be treated for Covid-19.

The newspaper

pointed out, for its part, that Gali is in the ICU of the San Pedro de Logroño Hospital, where he arrived last Sunday in an ambulance from Zaragoza, under the name of Mohamed Banbatouch. Hours earlier, the adviser to the SADR Presidency, Bachir Mustafá Sayed, denied that Gali had left Algeria, where he was recovering from a coronavirus infection.

His transfer to Spain would have been negotiated with Algeria and comes at a time of intensification of hostilities between the Polisario and Morocco, which last November broke a ceasefire of more than three decades. Since then the armed incidents have been repeated. Earlier this month, the head of the Saharawi National Guard, Adaj el Bendir, was killed in a Moroccan air strike with the support of an Israeli-made drone. Spain does not diplomatically recognize the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), which is part of international organizations such as the African Union, but maintains relations with the Polisario Front and develops cooperation programs in the refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria).

The National High Court maintains an open case for the torture and disappearances of dissidents in the Sahrawi refugee camps between 1976 and 1987 in which Gali is accused.

Gali, a former Sahrawi defense minister and former Polisario ambassador to Spain and Algeria, succeeded Mohamed Abdelaziz in July 2016, who died in May of that same year of lung cancer in the United States after remaining in power for 40 years.