Kept under house arrest an additional four years, the Oufkirs were finally released in 1991, but prohibited from leaving Morocco. In 1987, family members staged a dramatic escape by tunneling out of their secret desert prison, to enjoy only five days of freedom before being captured. The Oufkir family then passed fifteen years in various secret prisons, most often in solitary confinement. The palace announced General Oufkir's suicide and his wife and six children disappeared, not to be seen or mentioned again. In August 1972, her father's failed attempt to overthrow King Hassan brought an abrupt end to nineteen-year-old Malika's storybook youth. Adopted at age five by King Muhammad V (the first king of an independent Morocco and King Hassan II's father) and raised at the royal court, Oufkir begins her book with wondrous tales of an anachronistic seraglio life in a North African palace. Malika Oufkir is the eldest daughter of General Muhammad Oufkir, the brutal and much-feared Minister of the Interior for King Hassan II, Morocco's ruler from 1961–1999.

Her reception is striking, not least because American interest in Middle Eastern and North African culture is so often reduced to the question, 'Why do they hate us?' Still, the way her story was told in the United States-without historical or political context-raises troubling questions. 1 Oufkir-who also appeared on 60 Minutes, the Today Show, the Rosie O'Donnell Show, and NPR-recounted her imprisonment, torture, and extraordinary reversal of fortune at the hands of the Moroccan government, for rapt American audiences. Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert JailĮarlier this year, the Oprah Winfrey Show featured Malika Oukfir, whose Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail was both an Oprah book of the month club selection, and a New York Times non-fiction bestseller.

Stolen lives 20 years in a desert jail