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Morocco probes minister child abuse claims

The Moroccan government said Wednesday it had ordered a probe into claims that a French ex-minister had sexually molested boys in Morocco.

Published: 9 June 2011 10:32 CEST

Luc Ferry, a French former education minister, claimed in a television interview last week that another ex-cabinet minister had molested boys at a Moroccan orgy and that senior figures covered it up.

“The king’s prosecutor in Marrakesh received instructions from the minister of justice to open a thorough investigation,” into the affair, Nouzha Skalli, Morocco’s social development minister, told AFP.

In the television appearance, Ferry said he had heard about the scandal from “a prime minister” during his own time in office between 2002 and 2004.

He has insisted he has no specific proof that a sex crime took place, but was merely recounting what he had heard during his time in government from other senior French officials.

Skalli insisted there would be “zero tolerance” if the probe found proof that crimes were committed.

Also on Wednesday, the Moroccan rights group Hands off my Child filed a complaint in Paris against unspecified defendants for “sexual exploitation of minors” and failing to report a crime.

French prosecutors had already opened an investigation into the case, leading to Ferry being questioned last Friday for more than an hour in Paris by the police’s child protection unit.

It was not known whether he had named the alleged sex offender to police.

France on alert for social media disinformation ahead of European polls

Jean-Noel Barrot, minister for Europe at the foreign ministry, said two elements could possibly upset the poll on June 9: a high rate of abstentions and foreign interference.

His warning comes as French officials have repeatedly cautioned over the risk of disinformation — especially from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine — interfering with the polls.

To fight absenteeism, France is launching a vast media campaign to encourage its citizens to get out and vote.

As for disinformation, a new government agency mandated to detect disinformation called VIGINUM is on high alert, Barrot said.

The junior minister said he had urged the European Commission to help ensure social media platforms “require the greatest vigilance during the campaign period, the electoral silence period and on the day of the vote”.

He added he would be summoning representatives of top platforms in the coming days “so that they can present their action plan in France… to monitor and regulate” content.

VIGINUM head Marc-Antoine Brillant said disinformation had become common during elections.

“Since the mid-2010s, not a single major poll in a liberal democracy has been spared” attempts to manipulate results, he said.

“The year 2024 is a very particular one… with two major conflicts ongoing in Ukraine and Gaza which, by their nature, generate a huge amount of discussion and noise on social media” and with France hosting the Olympics from July, he said.

All this makes the European elections “particularly attractive for foreign actors and the manipulation of information,” he said.

Barrot mentioned the example of Slovakia, where September parliamentary elections were “gravely disturbed during the electoral silence period by the dissemination of a fake audio recording” targeting a pro-EU candidate.

A populist party that was critical of the European Union and NATO won and has since stopped military aid to Ukraine to fight off Russian forces.

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