The Butcher of Taroudant: save me from my torment

By : Saadia – Morocco

One day, in August 2004, our story began, in one of the southern cities of Morocco, Taroudant, a name that means “the boys have gone,” in the Amazighi language, and It is like whoever called it that name has foreshadowed the terrible events that would strike this peaceful city and break its quiet and monotonous lifestyle.

On that day, some passers-by found skeletons and human skulls lying on the riverfront of a river running along a valley there called “Al-Wadi El-Wa’er”. They called the police of the area, who came quickly to the place because finding such remains was unusual in a small town like Taroudant “.

found skeletons and human skulls

The skeletons were transferred to the police laboratories for the purpose of examination and identification of who they belonged to. The result of the forensic analysis was that these remains belonged to 8 children aged between 10 to 17 years old, who were strangled to death, and the report identified the date of the deaths occurred in the span of the past three years.

An intensive police investigations began to reach and find the perpetrator. At first, suspicions were circulating around some outsiders, people who weren’t native to the city, and also people with precedent in crimes related to sexual exploitation of minors, but the investigation quickly reached a dead end due to the lack of sufficient evidence. The suspects were released and the investigation returned to zero.

Police investigators kept returning to the place where the skeletons were found in hope of finding any evidence that they might have missed earlier, which could lead them to the murderer, but to no avail. And when it seemed like all hope to bring justice to those poor victims was lost, a divine intervention happened… because the last time the investigators decided to visit the scene of the crime and right before leaving the place, desperate as usual, suddenly and by chance one of the investigators noticed a dirty little paper and picked it, inside there was only one word written in it in French : (Hadhi)

Abdel al-aal al-Hadhi

This word was the start of the thread that led them to one of the food vendors near the main bus station in the city.. Abdel al-aal al-Hadhi.

The police did not find Al-Hadhi in his usual place near the station. So they searched for his house and found it. The house was nothing more than a random tin shack that he built in a spot near the cemetery.

According to the investigators, as soon as the police stormed his shack, he shouted: “Welcome, I was waiting for you to save me from my torment. Sleep no longer knocks my eyelids. Every night those children who I killed come to me in my dreams; they stand above my head screaming and weeping. Yesterday they attacked me, tied me, then they started stoning me. “

Al-Hadhi was arrested and admitted all his crimes, he was cooperative with the police and agreed to re-act his murder scenes.

buried his victims under his shack

He told the interrogators how he carried out his crimes. He told them that he stalked and studied the children at the bus station very well. He was looking for homeless boys who had no homes or ran away from their homes and had no one looking for them. Most of them were beggars, and some of them worked as a porter or a shoeshiner at the station. And because he is a food vendor, it was easy for him to gain the trust of these poor hungry children by giving them free food. And after gaining the trust of a boy, he would lure him to the shack where he would drug him and rape him, and then bury him alive under a mattress on which Al-Hadhi sleeps on, after digging a small pit and rolling him inside it, Al-Hadhi then puts the mattress over again and sits on top of it and continues to press until the boy’s bones breaks and the pit is leveled!.

Al-Hadhi said he stopped killing after he knew that the owner of the spot on which his shack had been built was planning to turn it into a residential building, and this made him extract the bones of the children from the pits in the floor of the shack and throw them in the valley.

Al-Hadhi tried to justify his crimes with what happened to him in his childhood, where he said he was subjected to gang rape by a group of young men when he was 12 years old, this left a great mental wound in him, and he also became homeless after the death of his mother and the marriage of his father from another woman, all this prompted him to rape children as a kind of revenge for himself, gradually this desire for vengeance turned into an enjoyable sick habit.

re-act his murder and a picture of the funeral of the children

When the judge asked him, do you regret your actions towards these children?

He replied: “This is between me and God, your honor”.

Al-Hadhi was sentenced to death in 2010. He is currently in the Kenitra prison on the Death Row. According to the news published in the press, he is beaten and hurt a lot by his fellow inmates because they have been horrified by his crimes against those innocent children.

The victims were identified and their bodies returned to their families for burial.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *