Rabat – On Sunday, Amazigh (Berber) activists marched to the grave of Omar Khalek, an Amazigh student who was brutally beaten to death by pro-Polisario students in 2016.
The march occurred at the invitation of the National Coordinating Committee of the Amazigh Cultural Movement, which continues to condemn the violent killing of Khalek.
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Khalek, known as “Izem” or lion in English, died 5 days after suffering serious injuries during the violent clash.
On its Facebook page, the committee posted videos of the rally on Sunday.
Marching to his grave, activists carried Amazigh flags and shouted slogans condemning the killing of the prominent activist.
Prior to the march, the committee also organized a conference to discuss violence in Moroccan universities and the killing of the activist.
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The committee also condemned an act of vandalism on Khalek’s grave. The gravestone was covered in black paint.
“In conjunction with the third anniversary of the assassination of the martyr Omar Khalek, a group of unknown people desecrated this grave for the second time to disrupt the commemoration,” the committee wrote.
The clashes, which erupted between Sahrawi and Amazigh students at the Faculty of Literature and Human Sciences in 2016, injured five other people.
In 2017, the Marrakech Criminal Court sentenced five people to 10 years in prison and 11 others to three years each for the premeditated murder of the Amazigh activists.
Spain deported another Polisario separatist, Hussein Bachir Brahim, to Morocco on January 17 of this year in connection to the clashes. Spain rejected the suspect’s asylum request. Morocco issued an arrest warrant for Brahim for alleged involvement in the killing of Khalek.
