RABAT - Moroccan authorities expelled to the Canary Islands Saturday a Western Sahara rights activist who was recently awarded a major peace prize in New York, a security source said.
Aminatou Haidar, 42, was arrested Friday in the disputed territory's main city of Laayoune after arriving at the airport from the Spanish archipelago for allegedly refusing to carry out police formalities. Moroccan authorities accuse her of links to the separatist Polisario rebel group.
"After her stubborn refusal to follow normal police procedures and renouncing her Moroccan citizenship upon her arrival at Laayoune airport ... Aminatou Haidar was sent back by plane Saturday to the Canary Islands," the security source said.
The activist told AFP by phone that she was arrested after writing Western Sahara as her country of residency on an entry form at Laayoune airport.
After arriving at Lanzarote airport on the Canary Islands, Haidar threatened to go on hunger strike if she was not allowed to fly back to Laayoune on Sunday where the mother-of-two lives with her children.
It was unclear whether she would be able to return as Moroccan authorities confiscated her passport when they arrested her, police said. She has a Spanish residency permit and could stay there if she wishes.
Haidar, a leading defender of the human rights of the Sahrawis, as the people of the Western Sahara are known, received the Civil Courage Prize from The Train Foundation in New York on October 21.
She said at the time that she risked being arrested upon her return to Western Sahara.
"This prize gives me the courage to pursue the non-violent struggle that I have been leading since I was 23," Haidar told AFP after receiving the award.
"I have been threatened with arrest on my return," she said.
Moroccan authorities imprisoned her for several months in 2005.
Haidar is a frequent critic of Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara after Spanish colonial rule ended in 1975, prompting an uprising by the Polisario for the independence of the territory.
Seven people were held on October 8 at Casablanca airport after they visited Western Sahara refugee camps run by the Polisario at Tindouf in southwest Algeria.
The members of the group are to appear before a military tribunal in Rabat on charges of supporting secession, Moroccan press reported.
On November 6, King Mohammed VI warned of a crackdown against "opponents of the territorial integrity of Morocco," referring to Sahrawis who support the Polisario Front.
Morocco has proposed broad self-government under its sovereignty in order to end the conflict which a string of UN peace plans has failed to solve.