Polisario seeks political settlement after handing all Moroccan captives

Some 404 prisoners, representing the last shift of Moroccan prisoners held by the people's front for the liberation of "the red Tributary and the Gold Valley" better known as Polisario, arrived in Aghadir, Morocco.

The prisoners were held on Algerian territories, by the Polisario. A plane rented by the Algerian ministry of defense transported the released persons from Tandouf in Algeria to Aghadir in Morocco, and they were welcomed by the minister of the Interior Mustafa al-Sahel and the foreign minister Muhammad Bin Issa.

Some of those prisoners spent almost 20 years in prison. In recent years the Polisario released some 2000 Moroccans in phases, and this phase was number 15 and the last.

In statement to al-Jazeera TV on Thursday, the leader of Polisario, Muhammad Abdul Aziz, said that the decision to release the Moroccans came as a good -will gesture without foreign pressures. He said that such initiatives aim at creating an atmosphere for a just and peaceful solution conducive to a referendum to decide the fate of the Sahara district, in southern Morocco.

However, the former minister of justice in Polesario, who split from the front at the meantime, Hamti al-Rabbani, stressed that the release of the Moroccan prisoners falls in the course of a political exchange. He added in an interview with al-Jazeera correspondent in Morocco that the prisoners' release seemed as if it's a "slave trade." The spokesman for the Moroccan government Nabil Bin Abdullah said that what was achieved is justice as a result of international pressures led by the USA.