On August 20, 2004, people in the valley below Taroudant found bones. Not one body: skeletons scattered across open ground, and eight skulls among them. They called the police, and within days it was the biggest story in Morocco.
The Agadir Court of Appeal commissioned an autopsy, carried out by Saïd Louahlia, a forensic pathologist who had trained as a profiler with the FBI. It established that the dead were adolescents, that they had been dead for at least six months, and that the remains had not lain where they were found. They had been buried somewhere else, dug up, and brought to the valley on the night of August 19, the night before they were found. Louahlia went to the prosecutor's office with his report and told them it was very likely the work of a serial killer.
Eight of the bodies had been carried in plastic bags. Some of the deaths were recent, within about three months. Others went back three years.
They were boys. The court's own autopsy put them between thirteen and sixteen; other accounts put most of them between eleven and fifteen. Five families in Taroudant had reported sons missing. DNA taken from the remains, compared at the police forensic laboratory in Casablanca, matched the parents of three, and each of those parents said the same thing: the boy had worked at the Taroudant bus station. Their names were not published.
Among the skulls lay a scrap of paper torn from a diary. On it someone had written "12 October, Week 41, Adidas 55, Hadi 2303, Adidas 5." The laboratory in Casablanca could make nothing of it. Investigators ran the name Hadi through their records and called in five men who carried it. The fifth, Najib Hadi, sold tickets at the bus station and plainly had nothing to do with the bones. But he had a brother who worked there too, at night, helping at a food stall.
Abdelaâli Hadi was arrested on September 7, 2004, at the house in the Mahatta neighborhood where he lived; one account dates the arrest to August 7, which would put it before the remains were found. He was forty-two. He opened the door to the officers and his brother and told them, "I have been waiting for you to save me from my torture. I have been suffering day and night. I want to sleep and heal." Asked whether he was the man who had killed the children, he said he was, turned his back, put his hands behind him and asked to be handcuffed.
He was a Taroudant man. He had been born there in 1962 to a poor family whose parents had come from the village of Ait Hadi; his father baked bread. He left school at eleven. After his mother died he moved to the Bensergao district of Agadir and worked as a night watchman, and at fourteen he was gang-raped by a group of street thugs. At sixteen he came home to Taroudant.
He gave police the names of every boy, and he admitted a ninth killing they had not connected to the others. That boy, he said, had been the first. He had buried him in a garden near a graveyard, gone back a month later, dug the body up and thrown it on a public dump.
The rest he had tied with plastic cord and tape, strangled, and buried in shallow pits on the land where he lived. He dug them up only when he learned that a cousin was about to build a house on the plot. On September 8 he walked investigators through the killings in public, before a crowd of Taroudant residents, and they seized the boys' clothing, plastic bags of the same kind as those that had held the remains, the cord and the tape.
The investigation had taken eighteen days, and the pretrial inquiry that followed was closed quickly because he cooperated fully. Before the investigating judge he talked at length about the rape he had suffered as a boy. Asked whether he regretted the killings, he told the judge it was none of his business. He went before the court on charges of premeditated serial assassination, torture, violence, rape of minors, kidnapping and unlawful detention.
He was not tried alone. Three other men stood with him, and all three were convicted, of rape of a minor and of failing to report a crime. They received between one and four years.
On December 2, 2004 the presiding judge questioned him from half past four in the afternoon into the night. He explained the scrap of paper. He had written his name and left it among the bones so that the police could find him; "Adidas" meant a Hadi who wore Adidas shoes, and "55" meant handcuffs on both hands, five being slang for handcuffs in Morocco. He told the court he had taken pleasure in killing the children. Asked whether he regretted it, he said that was between him and God. That night the Agadir Court of Appeal sentenced him to death. One later account dates the conviction to December 11, 2005, after a year-long trial; the contemporary press reported the December 2, 2004 verdict.
The court also ordered Hadi to pay a single dirham, a symbolic sum, to the National Observatory of Children's Rights and to the Moroccan Association for Human Rights, and to pay the families of the boys between three thousand and twenty thousand dirhams each. At the exchange rate of the time the largest of those payments was a little over two thousand dollars. One account puts his total fine and damages at 195,000 dirhams.
Morocco keeps the death penalty on its statute book and has carried out no execution since 1993. Hadi died on death row at Moul El Bergui Central Prison in Safi on May 6, 2022, aged about sixty. The boys' families said they were angry that he had never been executed.