Muere el director general de la agencia de noticias de Marruecos MAP

Khalil Hachimi Idrissi, director general of Morocco's official news agency MAP, died Saturday in Rabat at the age of 67 after a long illness.

Born on 14 August 1956 in Casablanca, Khalil Hachimi was an architect of the development of the media sector in the North African country and in the early 80s of the last century was known for his contribution to the creation and development of intercultural and community communication in France, where he worked on several radio stations. 

A graduate of the Institute of Geography at the University of Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne, he was a columnist, reporter and then editor-in-chief for many years of the weekly Maroc Hebdo International before creating, in 2000, Aujourd'hui Le Maroc, a general French-language daily.

In 2007, he was president of the jury of the National Press Prize before being elected president of the Moroccan Federation of Newspaper Publishers (FMEJ) in 2008, a position to which he was re-elected in 2011, as the MAP agency itself reported in its own gloss on the figure of its late director general. 

The late Khalil Hachimi Idrissi has several publications to his credit, including "Billets Bleus", Moroccan chronicles 1994-2000. In 2011, he was appointed by King Mohammed VI as director general of MAP. It was under his leadership that the Moroccan news agency boomed to establish itself as a reference point for news in Morocco and the Maghreb. 

After hearing the fatal news, Khalil Hachimi Idrissi was buried on Sunday after the addohr prayer in the Achouhada cemetery in the Rabat capital.