Moroccan Prime Minister Abdelilah Benkirane left for Mauritania Tuesday following controversial statements concerning Mauritania's territorial integrity.

Hamid Chabat, the Secretary-General of the Independent Party (PI), said in a speech he gave earlier last week in front of his fellow partisans that “Mauritania is a land that is purely Moroccan.”

Benkirane's official visit to Mauritania is meant to ease the tension between the two countries. 

He will meet with Mauritanian President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz as an envoy of Moroccan King Mohammed VI.

The statements created controversy in Morocco and prompted Morocco’s Ministry of Foreign Affairsto release a communiqué denouncing Chabat’s “dangerous and irresponsible” statements.

The communique stated that “the foreign affairs ministry flatly rejects these statements which undermine relations with a [sisterly] neighboring country and show a real ignorance of the Moroccan diplomacy’s orientations, laid by the King, and which advocate good neighborliness, solidarity and cooperation with the sister nation of Mauritania.”

Source: MENA