CASABLANCA, December 26, 2005 (IslamOnline.net) – The discovery and suspicious handling of an over-two-decade-old mass grave has caused an uproar in Morocco, with human rights' activists and legal experts demanding justice for the victims of the popular uprising of 1981.

Morocco's Equity and Reconciliation Forum (IEF) organized a sit-in Sunday December 25, in front of the security agencies headquarter in Casablanca to protest the mass grave found recently with the remains of 82 people.

The victims were shot dead by snipers with security forces during a strike against price hikes in 1981 during the era of late King Hassan II.

The protestors called for uncovering those behind the heinous crime and bringing them to justice.

"What is important is not to discover the mass graves, but to do justice to the victims and bring those involved in these massacres to justice," former interior minister Driss Al-Basri told Moroccan papers.

In June, 1981, heavy protest strikes in Casablanca broke out as a reaction to freezing in wages and cutting down subsidies on foodstuffs.

The incidents resulted in deaths and disappearances of scores of inhabitants of Casablanca.

Adding salt to injury, doubts were cast by Moroccan human rights society on the process used to exhume the bodies.

"Such practices in the dark in the presence of some IEC members and without any relative of the victims being present were part of an attempt to change the details of the crime to render any future fact-finding effort useless.

"It's positive that authorities are exhuming mass graves. But why do it secretly at night?" asked Abdelkarim El-Manouzi, a rights activist.

"IEC is considering taking the case to court," a member of the group, in charge of the investigation into the anti-human rights practices between 1956 and 1999, told IOL Monday, December 26.

The 17-member IEC, set up in January 2004, heard from 16,861 people who witnessed the incidents and relatives of the dead.

The commission found that 322 people had been shot dead by government troops in protests, and that 174 people had died in arbitrary detention. The graves of 85 people, who had been detained in secret prisons, were also identified.

But the IEC has been criticized by human rights groups for not naming perpetrators of abuse so they can be prosecuted. The Moroccan Association for Human Rights has published a list of alleged torturers it thinks should face trial. They include members of Morocco's current administration.

Late in November, a French magistrate looking into the disappearance in Paris 40 years ago of Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka arrived in Rabat for an agreement between the two countries to investigate the case.

He met in Casablanca with Moroccan magistrate Jalal Sarhane, in charge of the Moroccan end of the inquiry into the disappearance in October 1965 of Ben Barka, the leader of the Moroccan left and opponent of the late King Hassan II, who was kidnapped in Paris outside a famous restaurant.

He is believed to have been murdered but his body was never found and the affair remains a mystery.

Morocco's human rights group said it was in possession of information purporting that between 500 to 1,000 people were killed in 1981 protests.

On June 20, 1981, Morocco's workers association organized a strike in protest against prices increase and reduction of subsidy, in what was termed "martyrs of bread."

King Mohamed VI has tasked IEC with inquiry into the detention camps where detainees were kept and locating the mass graves locations, in addition to paying compensations for the living victims.