Separatists in southern Moroccan desert attacked and injured 150 Moroccan security forces, Moroccan interior minister Mohand Laenser said Monday.
These attacks in the Oyoun and Samara towns in southern Morocco “has been planned … and the objective was to provoke security forces and force them to intervene and then exploit it in media,” Laenser said in a statement before the parliament.
The separatits, he added, were exploiting visits by international figures “in order to show that there is instability in southern areas as well as using children and women to gain sympathy.” The separatists, said Laenser, “are financed by the Polisario front” which was demanding independence of the Sahara.
Oyoun and Samara have been witnessing demonstrations by pro-separatists groups in the wake of the extension of the mandate of the UN mission in the Sahara but without expanding its tasks to include human rights monitoring as proposed by the US
