The trial of a British man held in Morocco on charges of raping a young girl has been adjourned until next month, a rights activist who attended Tuesday's court hearing told Agence France Presse.

Robert Bill, 59, who did not attend the hearing in the northern town of Tetouan, is accused of kidnapping two Moroccan girls and raping another.

Morocco on Thursday launched an operation to give residency permits to tens of thousands of immigrants living in the country illegally, after the king expressed concern about their harsh treatment by the police.

Hundreds of people, almost all of them sub-Saharan Africans, queued outside the governor's office in Rabat hoping to get their papers, which would officially allow them to reside and work in Morocco.

Morocco has launched an operation to empty an oil tanker that ran aground during a storm near the southern port of Tan Tan with 5,000 tonnes of fuel on board, an official said.

The fuel was being pumped into trucks, with the operation to last between five and seven days depending on the weather, M'Hammed Atmani, police chief at the national ports agency, was quoted as saying by the official MAP news agency late on Tuesday.

A Moroccan rights group warned the government Thursday of a possible "humanitarian catastrophe" over the health of some 30 Islamist prisoners on hunger strike.

The Moroccan League for the Defense of Human Rights expressed its concern in a letter to Islamist Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane about the prisoners, held at seven prisons and on hunger strike since the beginning of October.

Moroccan authorities said Thursday they had dismantled a "terrorist cell" operating in several cities that included people trained in the use of firearms and explosives.

North Africa has been on heightened alert in recent years as regional jihadist groups have grown more powerful and as the turmoil in Libya following Moammarr Gadhafi's 2011 overthrow has left the vast and mostly desert region awash with weapons.

Security forces averted an attempt by about 1,000 migrants to rush a towering, triple-layer border fence separating Morocco from the Spanish-held north African territory of Melilla, Spain's government said Tuesday.

Authorities say it was the latest bid by desperate migrants to enter the Spanish cities of Melilla and Ceuta by scrambling over the six-meter (19-foot) border fences or crossing the Mediterranean in flimsy vessels.

A parliamentary opposition group has filed a bill to abolish the death penalty in Morocco, where a moratorium has been in place for 20 years, a member said Thursday.

The bill was filed last week in the lower house by the group of 39 lawmakers from the USFP left-wing opposition party, one of them told Agence France Presse, confirming local press reports.

Moroccan police violently suppressed a peaceful protest in the Western Sahara against a planned EU fishing accord with Rabat that covers the disputed territory's waters, witnesses said Monday.

About 50 demonstrators, many of them women, gathered in the Laayoune city center on Saturday evening carrying banners and chanting slogans, including "stop taking our resources," one witness told Agence France Presse by phone.

A Moroccan court Friday acquitted three teenagers accused of public indecency after pictures of two of them kissing were posted on Facebook, but reprimanded the couple, their lawyer told Agence France Presse.

The teens had risked possible prison sentences of five years under the kingdom's penal code, in a case that drew strong criticism from international rights groups and sparked a storm of online protest in socially conservative Morocco.

A Moroccan protester who broke into the compound of Algeria's consulate in Casablanca and tore down the country's flag during a diplomatic row was given a two-month suspended sentence Thursday.

The November 1 incident came during a demonstration against comments by Algeria's President Abdelaziz Bouteflika over the disputed Western Sahara, and a video of it was widely circulated on Moroccan websites.