RABAT, Jan 23:  Morocco has scrapped a highly controversial law allowing a child rapist to evade punishment if he marries his victim, as rights activists pressed the government to legislate to protect women from violence.
The amendment to Article 475 of the penal code, first proposed by the country’s Islamist-led government a year ago, was adopted unanimously by lawmakers, parliamentary sources said yesterday.
The offending article made international headlines in March 2012 when Amina Filali, 16, killed herself after being forced to marry the man who had raped her, and who remained free.
Right activists hailed the amendment, while stressing that much more remained to be done to promote gender equality and protect women from violence in the North African country.
“It’s a very important step. But it’s not enough… We are campaigning for a complete overhaul of the penal code for women,” Fatima Maghnaoui, who heads a group supporting women victims of violence said.
Global advocacy group Avaaz said it had handed a petition signed by more than a million people to Morocco’s parliament demanding that the government adopt promised legislation to combat violence against women.
Amnesty International said yesterday’s amendment was a step in the right direction but “long overdue,” and urged a comprehensive strategy to protect women and girls from violence in Morocco.
“It took 16-year-old Amina Filali’s suicide and nearly two years for the parliament to close the loophole that allowed rapists to avoid accountability.
“It’s time to have laws that protect survivors of sexual abuse,” the group’s deputy regional director Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said.
As in numerous other Arab countries, sexual harassment of women is commonplace in Morocco, despite the adoption of a new constitution in 2011 that enshrines gender equality and urges the state to promote it.
An official study published last month said nearly nine percent of Moroccan women have been physically subjected to sexual violence at least once, while the proportion of women subjected to conjugal violence is much higher.
A bill proposed by the Islamist-led government, threatening prison sentences of up to 25 years for perpetrators of violence against women, is still in the drafting stage. (AGENCIES)

JERUSALEM, Jan 23:  Israel has claimed to have busted a terror cell run by al Qaeda that was planning to attack the US embassy in Tel Aviv.
Israel’s internal security agency Shin Bet yesterday said the agency has arrested three Palestinians, two of them residents of East Jerusalem with Israeli identification cards, for an alleged involvement in an al Qaeda plot to carry out terror attacks.
The group had planned attacks at the International Convention Center here and the United States embassy in Tel Aviv, it said.
The three men were allegedly arrested on December 25 but the agency’s announcement followed the lifting of a gag order on the case by Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court.
About four months ago, a Gaza operator, who works under the Salafist alias Arib al-Sham, enlisted the three men, Iyad Abu Sa’ara, 24, of East Jerusalem’s Ras al-Khamis neighbourhood, Roubeen al-Najma, 31, of Abu Tor in East Jerusalem and Alaa Ranem, 22, of Al-Aqaba, a village near Jenin, the agency claimed.
Arib al-Sham allegedly told the three recruits that he worked for Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over the leadership of al Qaeda after the Americans killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011.
The security agency believes that their enlistment and deployment was conducted via internet without anyone of the three knowing about the other’s existence or their orders.
Abu Sa’ara is said to have admitted during interrogation that he received instructions to carry out a large-scale terror attack and that he had also begun learning the tenets of Salafism.
His father had apparently noticed his new-found interest in radical Islam and had tried to dissuade him, it said.
Meanwhile, US State Department officials are said to have acknowledged reports of the al Qaeda plot targeting the US embassy in Tel Aviv saying Washington is “closely following the situation” and has been in touch with the Israeli government.
“The US embassy routinely employs a range of measures to safeguard US citizens and all of our employees and their dependents,” the State Department official told the Jerusalem Post.
“We have a high degree of confidence in our own security staff and in the Israeli security forces,” the newspaper quoted the official.
The Shin Bet has claimed that “the phenomena of international jihad and al Qaeda is now in its infancy in the West Bank, after having already garnered hundreds of operatives in Gaza”.
“Together with the Palestinian Authority we can stop it” from spreading in the West Bank, the agency said. (PTI)

EAST PALO ALTO, Jan 23: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are donating USD 5 million to help expand a community health centre in Silicon Valley.
The gift announced yesterday will cover part of the USD 29 million cost for adding another facility to the Ravenswood Family Health Centre in East Palo Alto, Calif.
The new building is expected to be complete next year. The 29-year-old Zuckerberg has become one of the world’s richest people since he started Facebook’s online social network at Harvard University nearly a decade ago. Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at USD 19 billion.
Zuckerberg has been funneling some of fortune into philanthropy. Last year, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated Facebook stock valued at USD 900 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. (AGENCIES)
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