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Rabat – Moroccan YouTube celebrity Amine Radi has some harsh words about a Moroccan policeman’s behavior, with the YouTuber recording a Facebook Live in a Casablanca street to decry the brutality he was subjected to.
The Paris-based comedian, who rose to fame for his satirical videos on traditions and daily life in Moroccan and Maghrebi families, recently traveled to Casablanca for a show.
However, from his Facebook Live, the Moroccan YouTuber’s Casablanca experience has had some chilling moments. The Facebook Live scene shows Amine Radi complaining about police violence after an encounter with a policeman who apparently beat him up.
“We are in 2019 in Morocco and a policeman beats me up in traffic,” Amine Radi asks multiples times in the video. But the question is more an expression of surprise and frustration.
The video footage does not show what could have caused the incident.
Radi’s voice is coarse and high. Even as he tries to remain relax, the Moroccan is visibly shell-shocked. He does not seem to understand “why on earth” a policeman would beat him up in “heavy traffic” and in broad daylight for no obvious reasons other than he actually can do without fear of retribution.
As Radi complained, the policeman assaulted him on camera for wanting to show his face. Showing an officer’s face in a video is illegal in Morocco.
At one point in the video, however, one policeman is heard apologizing to Raidi.
But the YouTuber tells him off. “I am sorry brother. I’m in the middle of a Live,” Radi tells the now insistently apologetic officer.
To his thousands of followers, Radi gives a pessimistic, nearly cynical, appreciation of public behavior in Morocco. “Really, this 2019 and they still behave like this here,” Radi fumed. “I have never seen something like this before.”
In reaction to Raidi’s harsh criticism, the Casablanca police opened investigations in the Raidi case to shed light on the accusations of “a citizen who is claiming to have been verbally and physically harassed.”
The police department of Casablanca opened a judicial investigation under the supervision of the competent prosecutor’s office on Saturday afternoon to clarify the charges against a traffic police officer, supported by a video broadcast live on the social network Facebook, showing “a person who claims to have been physically and verbally assaulted by the police officer,” General Directorate of National Security (DGSN) said in a communiqué.
In addition to the judicial investigation, the DGSN launched a parallel administrative investigation to “determine the professional misconduct attributed to the police officer.”
