The Supreme Court of Spain has finally reviewed the conviction for rape pronounced more than 30 years ago by a court in Barcelona, against the Moroccan mason Ahmed Tommouhi, now aged 72. The latter was in a way an “Omar Reddad” of Spanish justice, obviously in other proportions.
Tommouhi has already been acquitted once by the high court. But for all that, that did not prevent him from completely serving the sentence for which he had been sentenced by the provincial court of the city of Barcelona on September 23, 1992 and a certain Margarita Robles (current Minister of Defence). He spent 15 years behind bars. Ahmed Tommouhi, born in Nador in 1951, spent 30 years fighting and proclaiming his innocence.
In 1992, he was therefore convicted of the rape of a 14-year-old girl in Cornella (Barcelona) which he denies having committed. His version today is based on a sperm report which reveals that it was not his genetic profile. The victim himself, several decades later, admitted to being mistaken in his identification.
Moreover, the Spanish Guardia Civil had arrested the real culprit Antonio García Carbonell in 1995, a sexual predator who had in common with Tommouhi only his physical appearance and small linguistic differences (he was a gypsy). Semen samples collected from six sexual assaults that year belonged to Carbonell and were used to land him 228 years in prison.
Also, through all these facts and others, the Supreme Court studied, this week, the advisability of annulling the sentence for which he spent 15 years in prison. With success, therefore, for Ahmed Tommouhi. The case dates back to the fall of 1991, when a wave of rapes hit the provinces of Tarragona, Barcelona and Girona. In November, Tommouhi was arrested by chance in a boarding house in Terrassa. Nuria, who was 14 at the time, reported him. Carried away in a whirlwind of police irregularities and judicial negligence, he took 15 years in prison.
The sentence was pronounced by the judge at the time Margarita Robles who had deliberately ignored an analysis report of the traces of semen found in the victim’s panties, from the scientific police of Barcelona. The court decided that it was not necessary to suspend the trial, as requested by the defense, for the experts to rule. Also Robles did not take into account the semen analysis and the recognition of the young woman had been enough to condemn Ahmed Tommouhi: “I proceeded to identify him without any doubt and with all my hatred”, a recognized Nuria in 2022 in a confession to El País.
In the article, the 44-year-old Today revealed that police walked the man in handcuffs past the victims before the joint line-up and believed it was him, although years later she realized his mistake. “It was very painful to think that I had pointed the finger at someone who hadn’t been. And I was really hoping that justice would do something “, she explained to the author of the article. Indeed, she had called him on the phone, on November 26, 2021, saying: “I am Nuria. I would like to tell you how difficult all of this is for me. I think that person is another victim. And that I really have it in my heart. I never knew what to do or how to help in this regard, but I know he was another victim in this whole process. I believe in him“.
Tommouhi’s lawyer offered to the Supreme Court to summon her and the journalist (Garcia Jaen) who wrote the paper and obtained the expert testimony ignored by Robles. “Well, if the blood type doesn’t match,can we say that the sperm also excuses it? », him asked the reporter. “Yes yes ! Both semen and blood“, explained the expert and graduate in pharmacy Eugenio Ojero.
Ahmed Tommouhi was 40 when he arrived in Spain. He had left, at the time, his wife and three young children. Six months later he was arrested and spent 5 years in prison. He never wanted to return to Morocco, waiting for the Spanish courts to admit they were wrong the three times he was found guilty of rape.
In 1999, seven before his release, the chief prosecutor of Catalonia, José Maria Mena, had asked for pardon, For Tommouhi, as well as another Moroccan, convicted for another rape (also overturned), Abderrazak Mounib died in prison. The prosecutor had a “deep conviction” that the two were innocent. The request for clemency passed through the hands of five different Ministers of Justice, Margarita Mariscal de Gante, Angel Acebes And Jose Maria MichavilaPP, and Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar And Mariano Fernández Bermejo, of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Party).