Abdelali Amer was born in 1961 into a middle-class family and lost both his parents while he was still a teenager. At about twenty he joined the army and was discharged almost at once for violence. What followed was a succession of prison sentences, for assault, unlawful confinement, rape and theft; Moroccan accounts say he had been imprisoned six times. His brothers and sisters, who had settled in Europe, drew away from him one by one, and by the end only one sister was still helping him. He was known as Boussemma, and in the Moroccan press as the Stone Killer.
In 2004 he came out of prison, where he had been held on a charge of raping an elderly woman, and began to kill.
He was living on the street himself, and he killed people who were living the same way. From October 2004 he attacked men sleeping rough on the coast at Rabat and Sale and along the banks of the Bouregreg, the river between the two cities, choosing places that were deserted and seldom visited. He crushed their heads with stones, and afterwards took whatever they had on them, which was very little.
The reason he was able to go on for ten months is not the one this entry previously gave. It said the victims had no addresses, no documents and nobody to report them missing. What the Moroccan reporting says is that the manner of death did the work: a destitute man found with a head injury on a river bank was recorded as an accident, and for months neither the word murder nor the idea of robbery as a motive was applied to any of them. An officer of the judicial police put the responsibility on society as a whole, and observed that the vagrants of Rabat could be gathered up in a day, were taken to a place outside the city, and were released again afterwards.
Four further attacks failed and those men lived.
On August 1, 2005 police found another body near the wholesale market in the Akkari district of Rabat, the fourteenth. This time the coincidence registered. The coast and the mouth of the Bouregreg were put under continuous watch, and within about a week he was arrested. He was confronted with two witnesses who were already serving sentences at the prison in Sale, admitted the killings without prompting, and then took the investigators to each of the places where he had killed, with an exactness of recollection that the officers said astonished them.
People in the Souika quarter of Rabat and at Bab Rahba in Sale had stopped going to those places at all.
Asked why he had done it, he answered calmly that his own brothers and sisters were the ones he would have killed first, if he could have got hold of them.
He was convicted of premeditated murder committed by ambush and sentenced to death on November 28, 2005. He was held at the central prison at Kenitra, which holds everyone under sentence of death in Morocco. The last execution in the country was in 1993, and his sentence was never carried out. He died in 2010 after a long illness.
Three conflicts in the record. The date of arrest is given as August 6 in one Moroccan account and August 9 in others. The number of dead is given as fourteen in most accounts and thirteen in some. And his year of birth is given as 1961 in the Moroccan press, where this archive had 1962.