Not at all a happy ending. Ahmed Tommouhi’s is the story of a colossal injustice, a chain of injustices, concatenated and irreparable. Because finally the Supreme Court has annulled the verdict that sentenced him to 24 years in prison, but that does not repair that of Abderrazak Mounib, convicted along with him, and who in the year 2000 died of a heart attack in the prison where he should not have have entered
Mounib and Tommouhi, who did not know each other at all, were sentenced in September 1992 for various violations committed in the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona throughout 1991.
In September 1992, in the middle of the Olympic hangover, a court chaired by the current defense minister, Margarita Robles, condemned them for those violations. In the following three years, Tommouhi added three more convictions for similar acts. His compatriot Mounib also received four convictions in total for robbery and rape. In total, the sentences for both added up to around forty years in prison.
But in 1997 one of the cases that had been attributed to them was dismantled, because the biological analyzes of a rape that had been caught on them showed that the perpetrator was actually a Spanish citizen, Antonio García Carbonell, who had acted together with a relative of his. . It turned out that this subject bore an extraordinary resemblance to Tommouhi and the fundamental evidence against him was the recognition at the police line-up. With the aggravating circumstance that the victims had seen his photograph in the press and had also been able to observe him live in a police car. The convictions were thus based on facial recognition by the victims. This circumstance prompted a debate – which persists – on the solidity of the testimony of the victims of a crime, whether sexual or not, often in circumstances of enormous confusion and tension.
In the rest of the cases attributed to the two Moroccans and that García Carbonell could have committed, it was not possible to obtain conclusive DNA evidence. In this way, the sentences of the two Moroccans could not be reopened or reviewed.
There were more police and judicial errors: one of the two convicted suffered from a problem with his testicles that prevented him from maintaining an erection, and despite everything, he was convicted of serious sexual assault. But the medical reports that accredited it were not provided in a timely manner during the process. A tenant of the Terrassa pension where Tommouhi was staying when he was arrested was not called to testify either, and that he could have proven that at least one of the nights that those violations took place the bricklayer was in his room .
Once the judicial process was exhausted, and despite the errors that the defendants tried to demonstrate, his ordeal entered another labyrinth. Political.
Mounib died in prison in 2000, and Tommouhi always refused to ask for pardon, the only way that at that time could grant him freedom. Consistency question. Tommouhi also refused to obtain any type of penitentiary benefit, because he considered that they were established procedures for the guilty to be reinserted, and he did not consider himself as such. He considered himself an innocent in prison.
In an unusual move, the former chief prosecutor of Catalonia, José María Mena, requested clemency in 1999 for the two convicted. From the opposition, the Socialists demanded that the Popular Party government, then led by José María Aznar, apply the measure of grace for those two obviously innocent men, but when the tables were turned and they came to power, they were the ones who denied it. “The government has decided that it is not an acceptable message to pardon a person convicted of rape,” said Juan Fernando López Aguilar, who would be justice minister at the time. Even the victim of the rape mistakenly attributed to Tommouhi (he was 14 years old when he suffered it) supported the Moroccan’s appeal against the sentences that condemned him in an interview with El País.
Tommouhi was released from prison in 2006, and served his full sentence in 2009. He had spent 15 years in prison for crimes he did not commit. He completely missed the childhood of his four children.
In 2008, the Tommouhi case was taken by the Parliament of Catalonia as an example of judicial malpractice that should never be repeated, although this did not imply any kind of compensation. He had already had it in 2001, when his innocence could be proven scientifically and legally in the case reliably attributed to García Carbonell, and which brought him compensation of around €108,000. A third of this amount was collected by the lawyers who had defended the Moroccan, according to him, and according to an investigation by journalist Braulio García Jaén, making him sign documents that he did not understand.
Upon leaving Can Brians prison, Tommouhi went to live in a town in the province of Barcelona with an adult man: his son Khalid, whom he had stopped seeing at the age of eleven.
