Legacy
Malika Oufkir at the 2006 Texas Book Festival, author of Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail and daughter of Mohamed Oufkir
On orders of the king, Oufkir’s entire family, his wife and their six children with the youngest being 3 years old, and two family friends were sent to secret desert prison camps after the 1972 coup attempt.[50] They spent 15 years in those secret prisons usually under solitary confinement. When they escaped by tunnelling out in 1987, they had 5 days of freedom where they revisited their old family home in Rabat only to find it razed to the ground by Hassan II. They were kept again in house arrest.[51] They were not released until 1991.[52] Partly because of pressure from French public opinion, they fled to France in 1996, a story that was detailed by Oufkir’s daughter Malika in her autobiographical book Stolen Lives.[53][54] Oufkir’s wife Fatima and his son Raouf also published their own accounts.[55]
