The first time Abderrazak Mounib made a collect call to me from prison was in late 1996. I didn’t believe him. He said that he and another Moroccan, Ahmed Toummouhi, had been imprisoned for five years for rapes they did not commit. The victims identified them without any doubt and the Supreme Court confirmed the sentences. “Innocent? Ha!” I thought, fat, inexperienced and disbelieving.

But Abderrazak, whom I would end up calling brother, had only one thing: time. He phoned me so many times and with such insistence that I ended up thinking that if the slightest part of what he was explaining was true, it would be a scandal for the Spanish justice system. When I finally started doing my job and moved my ass from the chair, I visited his wife, Fátima, who was then 48 years old and had four children, two girls and two boys between 8 and 18 years old.

“The Civil Guard knows they are innocent,” Fátima said in precarious Spanish. The Civil Guard, the police force that arrested the defendants, does not usually deny itself. For this reason, my prejudices took an unexpected turn when I discovered the report that the 411 Command delivered to the Prosecutor’s Office of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. The document endorsed, in effect, his innocence.

Before this investigation, the Civil Guard was about to re-arrest them, but could not: they were already in custody. Years after they entered prison there was another wave of rapes modeled on theirs. In fact, victims re-identified them in sex offender photo albums. The first thing investigators thought was that they took advantage of a license to reoffend.

But in prison they discovered that they hadn’t been out on leave for a single day, and that they wouldn’t be out any time soon, given the severity of the penalties. Something wasn’t quite right, but the mystery was about to be solved. The Civil Guard, who located a stolen vehicle used by the perpetrators of the second wave of violations, organized a troncha (surveillance) and arrested Antonio García Carbonell when he was going to use the car.

Three surprises. The first: the Spaniard looked like Ahmed Toummouhi’s twin. The second: objects belonging to the victims and the weapons with which he killed them did appear in his house, among other incriminating evidence that was never found in the case of the Moroccans. The third: Mounib and Toummouhi were convicted without DNA analysis, because only a handkerchief with semen from their alleged assaults was preserved, which at the time could not be analyzed…

But what was impossible when they were condemned became possible when Antonio García Carbonell fell. The DNA on the handkerchief identified him as a co-author of one of the attacks attributed to the Moroccans. They overturned this sentence, but the innocent continued in prison for other reasons that could not be reviewed at the time, because in this case there were no handkerchiefs or anything like that. It’s called justice.

It didn’t help that the Prosecutor’s Office asked for a pardon and admitted “serious doubts of conscience” about his guilt. The Civil Guard exonerated them in a shockingly forceful report. The document noted that the only evidence against the defendants was the identifications of the victims, but there was the possibility that the identifications themselves were unreliable.

As we have seen, one of the accused closely resembled Antonio García Carbonell, who was indeed convicted with irrefutable evidence. And keep this fact: the photo of the other innocent, that of Abderrazak Mounib, was published in two newspapers on the days of his arrest. This could have influenced the victims. Did they really identify him as her rapist or as the man from the newspaper?

The best example of how memory can deceive is the case of the handkerchief: although the DNA resoundingly exonerated the Moroccans, the victim of the assault continued to insist long after it was them. The victims of the second wave of attacks also said it was them, but this was materially impossible because they were already prisoners. Yes, prisoners, irrevocably prisoners. Prisoners, prisoners, prisoners.

Abderrazak Mounib, the inmate of cell 127 at Brians, died of a heart attack on April 30, 2000. Ahmed Toummouhi remained incarcerated until 2006, when he served two-thirds of his sentence and to be free The rapist Antonio García Carbonell also went on the streets in 2013. In 2015 he was arrested again, together with an accomplice. This time for a crime and a robbery.

As incredible as it may seem, the whole story fits the law: the conviction of two innocent people, the impossibility of reviewing their convictions, despite the fact that even the public ministry considered them unjust, and the release of someone as dangerous as Antonio García Carbonell.

OK, everything was legal. And legitimate? Decent? Fair? One day, when I finally trusted him, I asked him why me. Because he chose me for his calls. Then I knew. “Don’t you remember? You were one of the journalists who published my photo”. Every time I remember this answer from my friend Abderrazak Mounib, the backpack I drag in this job gets heavier and heavier.

This report updates the version published on our website on Friday, December 10, 2021

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