On August 1, 2005, police in Rabat found another body near the wholesale market in the Akkari district, a destitute man with his skull broken. By one count he was the fourteenth. For ten months men like him had been turning up dead along the coast between Rabat and Sale and on the banks of the Bouregreg, the river between the two cities, and for most of that time nobody had called any of it murder. The victims were homeless, found lying on their sides with head wounds on the side against the ground, and the head of the Rabat judicial police, a man named Imansar, later said that investigators could not tell whether they were looking at killings or ordinary deaths. The autopsy reports were ambiguous too, attributing death to head injuries from an accidental fall. Robbery was not considered as a motive. According to one account, what changed it was a victim found with the same wound facing upward, which could not have come from a fall.
The coast and the mouth of the Bouregreg were put under round-the-clock watch. Two homeless men who knew the killer well, one of them a man he had attacked and who had survived, gave police his description and were themselves jailed for failing to help a person in danger and failing to report a crime. In less than a week the man was arrested; most accounts give August 6, and others August 9. Confronted with the two witnesses at Sale prison, he admitted the killings without prompting and then led investigators to each of the places where he had killed, with an exactness of memory that the officers said astonished them.
He was Abdelali Amer, known on the street as Boussemma and in the Moroccan press as the Stone Killer. He had been born in Rissani in the southeast, in 1961 according to the Moroccan press, into a large family that was not poor, and lost both parents before he was twenty. He joined the army and was discharged almost at once for violence. After that came one prison term after another, six by the usual count, for assault, unlawful confinement, rape and theft. His brothers and sisters settled in Europe and drew away from him, until only an older sister was still looking after him between sentences. In 2004 he was released after serving time for raping an elderly woman, and in October he began to kill.
He was living on the street himself, among the people he killed, at Bab Rahba in the old city of Rabat. Neighbors there said he took drugs in large quantities and was seen every day looking for food, and that they had taken him for a harmless vagrant like any other. He chose deserted places, came up on his victims from behind and struck them on the head with a stone carried in a sock, and afterward took whatever they had, which was very little. One of his victims was a homeless woman, whom he raped before he killed her. Four other people he attacked survived.
An officer of the judicial police later put the blame on society as a whole, observing that the vagrants of Rabat could be rounded up in a day, taken out of the city and let go again. When he was asked why he had done it, Amer answered calmly that his own brothers and sisters were the ones he would have killed first, if he could have reached them. By the time of his arrest people in the Souika quarter of Rabat and at Bab Rahba had stopped going to those places at all.
The court of appeal at Sale convicted him of premeditated murder committed by ambush and sentenced him to death on November 28, 2005. He was held on death row at the central prison at Kenitra, which holds every prisoner under sentence of death in Morocco. The sentence was never carried out; Morocco's last execution was in 1993, though some reports of his sentencing give 1994. He is reported to have died in prison in 2010 after a long illness.
The accounts disagree on several points. Most count fourteen dead and some thirteen. One report of his sentencing described him as thirty, which cannot be squared with a birth in 1961. The arrest date is given as August 6 in most accounts and August 9 in others.