A Spaniard has been imprisoned in Morocco for 14 months for sharing videos of the Rif protests

Fatima has just returned from visiting her husband in Mohammedia prison, 20 kilometres from Casablanca. His daughters, aged five and three, have just returned from visiting their father at his workplace, a kind of factory or office with a pink-painted façade. "I've told them he's had to go away to work," she said. The lie has nothing to do with shame for the crime committed, but with the need to protect the little ones from situations that, perhaps, they cannot assimilate. Zouhir Ainaaissa, a Moroccan-born Spanish citizen, is serving a two-year prison sentence for sharing news and videos on Facebook about the 2017 Rif protests. He has now been behind bars for 14 months and has requested, so far unsuccessfully, to serve his sentence in Spain.

Zouhir, 35, has lived in Catalonia since he was a child. His parents left the Rif region where they are originally from and settled in Montesquiu (Barcelona), a town of about 1,000 inhabitants in inland Catalonia. From here he has not moved. When he met Fatima, he drew her to the village, where they make a living and have started a family. They both work in the same company: she is an administrator, he is a refrigeration technician. Despite his incarceration, the job "will be waiting for him," the boss promised Fatima.

The businessman's empathy is a sign of the affection that the residents of Montesquiu feel for Zouhir and his family. His parents had participated in the so-called "language pairs", which allowed locals and newcomers to hold meetings to promote the learning of the Catalan language. The mayor, Carles Colomo, also remembers the involvement of the Ainaaissa in the town's festivities and how in the popular calçotades they kept "a few cuts of chicken" for them. The City Council has unanimously approved a motion calling for his release and return home and denounces that he has been the victim of an attack on freedom of expression.

Peaceful family life was broken during the 2022 holidays. "We were thinking about where to go, whether to stay here or travel to Morocco. We hadn't been there for a long time. In the end, we made up our minds," Fatima explains. They traveled to the south of the peninsula and traveled by ferry with the two girls. When they disembarked in Nador on the night of 8 August, Zouhir was taken into custody by the police without explaining why. He didn't know (he couldn't know), but the authorities had issued a search and arrest warrant for him for events that had occurred four years earlier.

In the spring of 2017, intense protests erupted in the Rif (northern Morocco) led by young people, fed up with the lack of opportunities. Neither the remittances sent by migrants from Europe nor the cultivation of hashish that enriched a few had improved their living conditions. The mobilizations were harshly repressed by the Alawi monarchy, but videos of what happened in cities such as Al Hoceima were disseminated on social networks. From his home in Montesquiu, Zouhir shared some of these videos and news on his Facebook profile (back in 2018).

Fatima, in Montesquiu, asks her husband to serve his remaining sentence in Spain so that he can be closer to his daughters.

Morocco's zeal for any autonomist or separatist movement is extreme. And its surveillance capabilities have been proven through the use of systems such as Pegasus, the Israeli software for espionage through mobile phones. Zouhir's case also shows that the regime effectively monitors social networks, even of citizens who have been living abroad for decades and who, like him, now only use Spanish passports. "Zouhir shared these videos in Spain, but the Moroccan Penal Code allows criminal acts committed outside the country to be prosecuted under a single formula, that of the threat to national security," says Marc Serra, the family's lawyer who, with great difficulty, is trying to get the man to serve the remainder of his sentence in Spain.

Serving your sentence in Spain

Zouhir was sentenced to two years' imprisonment and fined 10,000 dirhams (about €1,000) for the offence of insulting the flag and symbols of the Kingdom and instigating to commit such acts by electronic means. In the proven facts of the judgment, it is only stated that he disseminated the videos of the Rif protest. Nothing else, I didn't even leave comments on those posts. "When the protests subsided, he stopped sharing posts, his Facebook was inactive," says Fatima, who was shocked by an arrest that has disrupted family life. The man was convicted in the first instance and on appeal with a speed that the Spanish justice system would want. He has already been in prison for 14 months because, in Morocco, sentences are served almost in their entirety.

The lawyer (and Montesquiu with him) is trying to get the family reunited as soon as possible. Last February, a file was opened so that, as a Spanish citizen, he can serve his sentence in a Catalan prison. The request has not yet been resolved, as time passes and the two years in prison are approaching. Communication is not easy and is always indirect, through the Spanish consulate or embassy. "We are completely unaware of the status of the procedure. You meet the requirements, because you have Spanish nationality and have paid the fine. But it seems that the Prosecutor's Office has yet to make a statement. We are not moving forward," laments the lawyer. At the same time, Zouhir has also requested his provisional release.

From his cell in Mohammedia, a pink-painted prison where security measures are more lax, Zouhir can barely communicate with his family. He has the support of a brother who lives in Morocco. But he can't get letters from his wife or drawings from his daughters. Fatima has been able to go to see him on three occasions this year; the last one, this week. "I've seen him well. Holding on, but fine." The visits are short and somewhat disappointing because, unlike in Spain, there are no vis-à-vis rooms, only a huge enclosure where the rest of the prisoners are: for the girls, the co-workers of a father who has been away from home for too long and whom, says Fátima, they really want to have back home.

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