The supreme acquits a Moroccan bricklayer sentenced for 10 violations that he did not commit | Spain

The Moroccan mason Ahmed Tommouhi, 74, arrested by chance in a Catalan pension for more than 30 years, is innocent of the ten violations for which he was convicted – five as an author and five as a necessary accomplice; The true authors were two rapists who acted as a couple. The Supreme Court has acquitted it from the last six by revoking the sentence issued by the Tarragona hearing for the violations of three young people committed on the night of November 9 to 10, 1991. Tommouhi, who was imprisoned for 15 years and three others on probation, received the news of this third acquittal at his daughter’s house in a town in Barcelona, ​​where he lives with his son -in -law and four of his grandchildren. « Thank you, thank you very much. They ruined my life, but this takes my fog of the chest and heart, » he told El País.

The magistrates have agreed to estimate this new demand for review by Tommouhi’s lawyer, according to sources from the Supreme Court. The Supreme’s Criminal Chamber, for the third time, thus consecrates in its case the true end of this extraordinary appeal: « That prevails, on the final sentence, the authentic truth and, with it, with it, the material justice on the formal », as announced The car that authorized the admission to the process of review in 2024.

Last week, in the thread of the previous condemnation revoked and following the criteria of the State Advocacy, the National Court He ruled that Tommouhi does not deserve compensation because his case is not « an obvious judicial error ». The demand for compensation and this third review of the Supreme Criminal Chamber have no procedural relationship, they are independent causes of another. The appeal for compensation, when it is presented, will go for a different channel, that of the contentious-administrative room.

Tommouhi has been waiting for decades. Married to a woman she has not seen since she was arrested in 1991 and who has never stopped trusting him, as her relatives tell, she will soon make 34 years who was arrested in a Terrassa pension because she was Moroccan, short, plump and had tickets. On November 11, 1991. Accused with a single proof of charge, the signaling in recognition wheel by some victims and witnesses of a series of wild violations and robberies committed that fall in Catalonia, was convicted of the face in three judgments for rape. In a room, whose conviction is still in force and will be the following to resort, he was convicted of theft. Until that fourth is revoked, Tommouhi will continue to wait, he says that « clean » his name at all.

In the last of the rape judgments, held at the Provincial Court of Tarragona shortly before Christmas of 1994, Tommouhi was shouted from « Moors children of a bitch. » The sentence issued on the day after kings of 1995 is the one that now has just revoked the Supreme based on facts and new evidence that demote the account of the conviction.

The first of those new facts, and the most relevant, is that in 2023 the Supreme already revoked a second conviction for two violations, in that case committed in Cornellá two days before against two minors. That revocation, in addition to being a new legal fact in itself, discarded with the certainty of a semen analysis That Tommouhi was the rapist and, therefore, neither does the Renault 5 gray driver, registration B-7661-FW, used in Cornellà (Barcelona).

With that same car and with that same registration the violations of the cause of Tarragona reviewed now were committed and in which Tommouhi had also been indicated as the driver. The journalistic research of Poetic justice He first linked that car with violations committed when they were already in jail. The Supreme has declared that link proven, and collects it to declare his innocence in Tarragona.

Tommouhi did not drive that car – it does not even know how to drive – and was neither in the henchman nor in the bisbal the night of cars. In 1991, Tommouhi, who on Saturday, November 9 in the morning had found where to stay in Terrassa after a week in a new job, was sleeping at the Aguet pension, in a room with a compatriot who did not know, but with whom the owner of the pension decided to house him when he arrived. Applying the same selection criteria, the police, in addition to Tommouhi, arrested the other host because he was also Moroccan and had a mustache. His name was Mostafa Zaidani.

In another new key, Zaidani was located by this journalist years later. « What happened to me, that does not happen to anyone, » he said, referring to the 48 hours he spent at the police station and before knowing that his roommate, Tommouhi, had been sentenced to 57 years and 40 days for violations committed that same Saturday night, more than 100 kilometers away. « And how did he fly or what? » The Supreme Court took into account this fact by admitting the appeal, but does not mention it now in its sentence.

It is the second review in favor of Tommouhi that Carbonell wins in the Supreme. The first of the three, was obtained by the then chief prosecutor of Catalonia in 1997, after an investigation of a civil guard, Reyes Benítez, and a DNA analysis, had demonstrated a year before Tommouhi had been confused with the true rapist, Antonio García Carbonell, physically very similar to him. For decades, the case was entangled in the skein of the review model. A pre -constitutional model in 2015.

Not only Tommouhi was confused, so was another Moroccan next to the one who was convicted in that first conviction, Abderrazak Mounib. Who was confused Mounib, a street vendor since the age of 14 and who died in jail at 48, three years after that first revocation of the Supreme, we do not know. The DNA only revealed that it was a close relative of the Violer confessed García Carbonell, but his accomplice has never been identified or detained for those crimes of the 1990s.

The day of Tarragona’s trial, people received Tommouhi and Mounib shouts: « Moors sons of a whore, we are going to kill you. » In the hall I was also silent. Tommouhi, visited by this journalist in jail in June 2006, three months before leaving provisional, recalled how he learned who he was. « He was my wife, » his tragedy partner, Mounib, condemned like him and with the same only proof of charge, also more than 50 years in prison also for the cause of Tarragona, among others, had told him after the trial.

Mounib died in jail on April 26, 2000. His widow, Fatima, lives in Barcelona; The widow in the life of Tommouhi, Fadma, continues in Morocco, where she stayed with 28 years and three young children when he emigrated to Catalonia in 1991. There, in Nador, on the other side of the border with Melilla, he also lives his eldest daughter, who was then 13 years old and today he is 47. In a documentary that an Argentine film made in 2011, he said of his father: “I have not seen him for his father. Calle would not recognize it. ”