Ministers from the Istiqlal party quit Morocco's Islamist-led ruling coalition on Tuesday, a spokesman for the conservative party told Agence France Presse, threatening a government shakeup or snap elections.

"It's official, our ministers have just presented their resignation to the head of the government (Abdelilah Benkirane)," Istiqlal spokesman Adil Benhamza said.

Around 100 African migrants stormed a border fence from Morocco into Spanish territory on Tuesday, leaving five police officers injured, Spanish authorities said.

Officials said about 40 of the migrants managed to cross the fence separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast, in the latest in a wave of such attempts.

Families separated for almost four decades by the conflict in Western Sahara will be reunited, often for the first time, by the expansion of a U.N. program for refugees living in camps near Tindouf, Algeria.

An agreement reached in Geneva between Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and Western Sahara guerilla group the Polisario Front will initiate a new flight schedule to ferry refugees to their families and vice versa for 2014.

Hundreds of African migrants hurling stones stormed a border fence from Morocco into Spanish territory in a "violent" assault on Wednesday, authorities said, the latest in a series of such attempts.

A local Spanish government spokeswoman said there was a "massive assault" in the early hours at one point of a six-meter (20-foot) fence separating the Spanish enclave of Melilla from Morocco on the Mediterranean coast.

A Moroccan father of five died after setting himself on fire in the central Meknes region in protest at having his application for a residency permit rejected, a human rights activist said on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Monday in the town of Sebaa Ayoun, where Abdelkabir al-Atawi, 50, needed the permit to avoid having to pay the hospital fees for his wife who was sick, said Habid Benkarroun, the Meknes representative for the Moroccan Association of Human Rights.

Vines stretch to the horizon under the hot summer sun in a vineyard near Casablanca, one of the oldest in Morocco, where despite the pressures from a conservative Muslim society, wine production -- and consumption -- is flourishing.

"In Morocco we are undeniably in a land of vines," says wine specialist Stephane Mariot.

Human Rights Watch called on Moroccan judges to halt convictions based on confessions obtained through torture, saying in a report released on Friday that failure to probe such claims encouraged further abuses by police.

"The country's judicial reform agenda needs to include stronger safeguards to ensure that courts discard as evidence any statement made to the police under torture or ill-treatment," the rights group said.

A Moroccan editor was handed a two month suspended prison sentence on Monday for defamation, after writing that an Islamist minister had organized a lavish, alcohol-fueled dinner during an official trip abroad.

The court in a suburb of Casablanca also fined Youssef Jajili, the director of Al-Aan magazine, 50,000 dirhams (4,500 euros), and ordered him to pay a symbolic dirham to the plaintiff, Minister of Industry and Trade Abdelkader Amara.

Some 200 members of Morocco's pro-reform February 20 protest movement gathered outside the justice ministry in Rabat on Wednesday to demand the release of political prisoners, an Agence France Presse journalist reported.

The protesters were joined by hundreds of unemployed graduates, who hold near-daily demonstrations in the capital.

Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan left Morocco for Algeria on Tuesday, the second leg of a North African tour, as the worst political crisis of his 10 years in power showed no sign of abating.

After arriving on Monday at the head of a senior ministerial delegation and accompanied by a large number of businessmen, he and Moroccan counterpart Abdelilah Benkirane signed a joint political declaration on developing strategic ties, official Moroccan media said.