Princess Latifa Amazhun, mother of Mohamed VI and second wife of King Hasan II, who died in 1999, has died in Rabat at the age of 78 in the same way she lived the rest of her life, as the great unknown of the Alawite royal family . Without her presence in public life, Moroccans have barely seen her image, not even at the time of her death being announced in a laconic statement from the Royal Palace late on Saturday afternoon. She had been admitted since 2022 due to pancreatic cancer in a clinic in Paris, where she received a visit from the current sovereign last April, she had presumably been transferred shortly after to the Moroccan capital.
His remains have been resting since Saturday in a mausoleum located inside the royal palace grounds. No official mourning has been declared, and although public radio and television broadcast a chanted recitation of the Koran after suspending the usual programming, the Mawazine festivals in Rabat and the Gnawa music festivals in the Atlantic city of Essaouira maintained their planned performances. with a large influx of public.
Lala Latifa was born into a family of notable Berbers from Khenifra, in the deep center of Morocco, daughter of a local governor and granddaughter of a fighter against French colonial troops. In 1961 she married Hassan II a few months after his accession to the throne, in a double marriage ceremony in which the king’s brother, Moulay Abdullah, also married Lamia Sohl, daughter of a Lebanese prime minister. She thus became the second wife of the monarch, who had had no children in his first marriage. The Moroccan press used to refer to her as the “mother of the royal children” after giving birth to princesses Meriem (1962), Asma (1965) and Hasna (1967), and princes Mohamed (1963) and Rachid (1970). ).
Ten months after the death of Hasan II, in July 1999, Lala Latifa married Mohamed Mediuri, who had been chief of the late king’s bodyguards. The couple settled in Neully-sur-Seine, a wealthy area near Paris, where the princess owned a residence where Mohamed VI visited her during her frequent stays in the French capital. According to the Moroccan press, the current monarch was closely linked to his mother, whom she honored in 2018 by naming a newly built mosque in Salé, a city adjacent to Rabat, after her. The princess also used to spend some time in Marrakesh, where her new husband was from.
In the midst of the turbulent reign of Hasan II, who survived two serious attacks, General Hamu Amazhún, Lala Latifa’s half-brother and head of the Rabat military region, was executed in 1971 along with nine other high-ranking officers in a very summary execution that was broadcast on television. The military was involved in the coup d’état in Skhirat (a coastal town located south of Rabat), in which they attempted to assassinate the king through a massive attack on his summer palace.
Messages of condolences from leaders of Arab countries have followed one another since the death of Mohamed VI’s mother was announced. Among them, the one sent by the president of Algeria, Abdelmayid Tebún, stands out. The Algerian Government broke diplomatic relations with Morocco three years ago in the midst of the dispute over the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, which Rabat wants to integrate under its sovereignty with a certain degree of autonomy, while Algiers defends the claim of the Polisario Front (based in the desert southeast of Algeria since 1975) of independence after a process of self-determination.
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