BBC Monitoring

Excerpt from report by Moroccan news agency MAP

    Rabat, 17 July: The public prosecutor in Casablanca ordered the Criminal Investigation Department to open a preliminary investigation into the publication of a report, last Saturday [14 July], by El-Watan weekly magazine. The report was headlined "the secret reports behind the state of alert in Morocco".

    The public prosecutor also issued an order to keep Abderrahim Ariri, the editor-in-chief of El-Watan, and Mustafa Hurmat Allah in police custody.

    The public prosecutor at the Appeal Court in Casablanca, Moulay Abdallah Alaoui Belghiti, said in a statement to Moroccan TV tonight that "preliminary search resulted in seizure of several documents in the possession of the editor-in-chief which were issued from different security departments and marked as top-secret".

    Following is the statement of the king's general prosecutor at the Appeal Court in Casablanca: "El-Watan weekly magazine published on Saturday, 14 July in Casablanca a report headlined 'the secret reports behind the state of alert in Morocco'. Abderrahim Ariri, the editor-in-chief, who prepared the cover page with Mustafa Hurmat Allah, published reports which contained national defence secrets. The publication, in itself, is reprehensible and against the law. The public prosecutor ordered the Criminal Investigation Department to carry out a preliminary investigation to discover how these secret documents were leaked and who are the responsible".

    [Passage omitted]

    Source: MAP news agency, Rabat, in Arabic 2210 gmt 17 Jul 07