Abdelali Hadi was sentenced to death in December 2004 by the criminal court at Agadir, in southern Morocco, for the murders of nine boys from the Taroudant area. The case became public in the summer of that year and caused widespread fear in the region. The families of the victims, local associations and the national press followed the investigation from the first arrests in early September to the verdict in early December, a span of about three months.
An Associated Press dispatch of December 3, 2004, identified the defendant as Abdelillah H., 32 years old, single, and employed as an assistant at a food stall at the Taroudant bus station. A later article in Le360 (April 2018) gave his age as 39 at the time of the crimes and described him as a street vendor. The two descriptions do not match on age or on trade. Taroudant itself is a town in the Souss valley, about 600 kilometers from Rabat, the capital.
The fullest account of his early life gives a third age. It says he was born in Taroudant in 1962, which would have made him 42 in 2004, to a modest family whose parents had come from the village of Ait Hadi; his father was a baker. He left school at 11. After his mother died he moved to the Bensergao district of Agadir and worked as a night watchman, and he returned to Taroudant at 16.
The victims were nine boys. The agency report of December 2004 gave their ages as 13 to 16. Their families gathered outside the office of the prosecutor general at the Agadir Court of Appeal in the days after the arrest. A local association, "Touche pas a mon enfant" ("Do not touch my child"), supported the families through the trial, Le Matin recorded in April 2009.
Le360 reported in 2018 that the killings took place between 2001 and 2004. The deaths occurred over a span of years, not in a single incident; the dates of the individual deaths are not on record.
A headline in Le Matin in April 2009 refers to eight child victims, while the same newspaper in September 2004 and the agency report of December 2004 both say nine, as do Le360 in 2014 and 2018 and a report of 2022.
The case came to public notice in August 2004 and spread alarm across the Taroudant area, the AP dispatch of December 2004 recorded.
On August 20, 2004, residents came upon human remains, among them eight skulls, scattered through the valley below Taroudant. An autopsy ordered by the Agadir Court of Appeal and carried out by the forensic pathologist Saïd Louahlia found that the dead were adolescents of 13 to 16 who had died at least six months earlier, and that the remains had been taken up from where they lay and moved into the valley; investigators fixed the move to the night of August 19. DNA matched three of the dead boys to their parents, and each family said its son had worked at the bus station in Taroudant. Police concentrated on the station, and a note found beside the remains bearing the name Hadi led them to a station employee whose brother, Abdelali, also worked there and lived in the Mahatta neighborhood. The inquiry led to an arrest soon afterward.
The date of the arrest is reported two ways. The Associated Press dispatch says he was arrested on September 2. Le Matin's 2009 article says September 7. Le Matin noted on September 10, 2004, that accounts of the arrest differed.
On September 9, 2004, he was brought before the prosecutor's office at Agadir. Le Matin reported on September 10 that he had confessed and that the investigation of his case was opening between Agadir and Taroudant. He also admitted a ninth killing, the first he had committed, which the police had not connected to the others. The pretrial inquiry took 18 days. The paper also reported that three other men had been arrested in connection with the inquiry. All three were tried with him, and at the verdict in December the court sentenced them to prison terms of one to four years for the rape of a minor and for failing to report a crime. The newspaper said the school year was due to begin on September 16 and that judgment was expected to take weeks.
He was tried for murder, with other charges. As the Moroccan news agency listed them, they included premeditated serial killing, torture, violence, rape of minors, kidnapping and unlawful detention.
The trial took place at Agadir before the criminal court, a bench of professional magistrates with no jury. Le Matin described it in 2009 as the criminal chamber of the Court of Appeal at Agadir, and Le360 in 2014 repeated that the same criminal chamber had passed the death sentence. The proceedings were short by the standards of a case of this size: about three months passed between the referral to the prosecutor and the verdict.
Two organizations took part as civil parties: the Observatoire National des Droits de l'Enfant (ONDE) and the Association Marocaine des Droits de l'Homme (AMDH). Little of the testimony survives. When the judge asked whether he regretted what he had done, he answered that it was a matter between him and God.
On the evening of Thursday, December 2, 2004, the court found him guilty of the murders and sentenced him to death ("condamne a la peine de mort"). The news agencies reported the verdict the next day, Friday, December 3, 2004. The court also ordered him to pay one symbolic dirham to each of the two associations that were civil parties, and to pay each victim's family between 3,000 and 20,000 dirhams in compensation. A later report, in May 2022, put that compensation at 195,000 dirhams in total for the families of the nine victims.
Le Matin's 2009 article gives the date of the verdict as December 20, 2004. That does not agree with the agency report, which places the sentence on Thursday evening and was published on December 3, 2004. The December 2 date is the one the contemporary dispatch supports.
The dispatch noted that he could appeal to the Supreme Court in Rabat. Whether he appealed, and how the Supreme Court ruled, is not on record.
Courts in Morocco continue to pass death sentences, but the December 2004 dispatch noted that no one had been executed in the country since 1993. No execution, pardon or formal change of his sentence is on record.
Le360 returned to the case twice. In April 2014 an article about an unrelated life sentence in Taroudant recalled that the same criminal chamber had sentenced him to death in December 2004 for the murder of nine children. In April 2018 a list of Moroccan serial offenders repeated the death sentence.
On May 7, 2022, the news site LeSiteinfo wrote that he had died the week before in the central prison at Moul El Berki, in Safi. It described him as serving a life sentence; other accounts date his death to May 6, 2022, in the prison at Moul El Berki, and say he was still under sentence of death. The families of the victims were angered that he had never been executed. The cause of death is not on record. That description differs from the death sentence recorded in 2004. Whether the sentence was formally reduced, and when, is not on record. The same article repeated the figure of nine child victims and the compensation order by the Court of Appeal at Agadir.
Several matters remain uncertain. The date of arrest is given as September 2 and as September 7. The date of the verdict is given as December 2 and as December 20, and the first fits the day-of-the-week detail in the contemporary dispatch. The number of victims is nine in every account except one 2009 headline that says eight. His age is given as 32 in 2004 and as 39 in a retrospective piece. The death-versus-life question in the final reports is unresolved: the 2004 and 2014 reports say death, the 2022 report says life.
2001 to 2004: period of the killings, according to a 2018 article.
August 2004: the case becomes public in the Taroudant area.
September 2 or 7, 2004: arrest (sources differ).
August 20, 2004: residents find human remains, among them eight skulls, in the valley below Taroudant.
September 9, 2004: brought before the prosecutor at Agadir; Le Matin reports a confession and three further arrests.
December 2, 2004: sentenced to death by the criminal court at Agadir for the murders of nine boys; three co-defendants receive one to four years.
December 3, 2004: sentence reported by the news agencies.
April 2009: Le Matin reports on the families and the local association that supported them.
May 6, 2022: dies in prison at Safi, by most accounts; LeSiteinfo, reporting the death on May 7, describes him as serving a life sentence.