He spent 15 years in prison accused of various crimes of rape that he did not commit. The Supreme Court announced yesterday the sentence that puts an end to the judicial martyrdom of the Moroccan citizen Ahmed Tommouhi, 73 years old, who yesterday only had a petition in his house in Martorell: "I only wish that an injustice like mine does not never happen to anyone." "But I can't say that this judicial recognition makes me happy, nobody is going to give me 32 years back," he explained by phone to La Vanguardia. "I was right and I always said it and now it's proven."
The sentence acknowledges some of the glaring judicial errors that led to the sentencing of Tommouhi and Abderrazak Mounib; He died in prison in 2000: the trial was held without the court – presided over by the current Defense Minister, Margarita Robles – analyzing an expert report with the analysis of traces of semen obtained from a victim who were not Tommouhi's and therefore they could not be evaluated, and the two members of the scientific police who had prepared the report were not called to testify.
In 1997, a conviction against Tommouhi was annulled because the remains of semen found on the clothes of a victim were actually from Antonio García Carbonell, a Spanish citizen who bears a great physical resemblance to Tommouhi.
García Carbonell, a gypsy, was arrested in 1995 and was sentenced to various sentences that totaled 228 years in prison for six sexual assaults. In some cases, the victims reported peculiarities in the language of the rapist. Tommouhi's Spanish is precarious.
The resemblance data is key: the criminal proceedings against Tommouhi were based on the visual recognition of some of the victims of those violations, without taking into account that his photograph had been disseminated by the media and that he coincided in a building court with any of them. Tommouhi and García Carbonell are extraordinarily similar. They don't know each other at all.
The conviction annulled yesterday by the Supreme Court was based on visual recognition by the victim, proof of charge that the Tommouhi case calls into question in a generic way: "In my opinion we should not suppress visual recognition, but I think we should weigh more precisely the importance given to this type of test. I am convinced that there are innocent people in prison wondering what they are doing there, knowing that they are innocent, and knowing that they have been accused in a wrongful admission. We must puncture that soufflé that the law is close to an ontological truth. I think it is very important to eliminate the idea of the infallibility of justice, that dogma must be broken, because law is administered, but justice is not”, reflected yesterday, at the request of La Vanguardia, the lawyer and doctor of law Marc Molins.
We are in the year 1991, and Catalonia suffers a wave of brutal violations, all with a similar modus operandi. Two men in a car look for potential victims in secluded places, where they approach them, where they gag their companions (if any) and rape them, first one and then the other. A judicial source who worked at the time explains that in a few months there were 17 cases in similar circumstances. Most of them did not go to court, basically because the victims gave up, or lacked evidence, and the wave was reduced to five or six cases.
One of them happened in Tarragona, where the rapist couple approached a group of 14 or 15-year-old adolescents, boys and girls, in a vehicle. They were armed and sexually assaulted two of the girls. Another case was in La Secuita, where they approached a couple in a car and raped the 21-year-old girl, after reducing the boy.
In Esplugues de Llobregat, they forced two 14-year-old girls who were waiting for a bus to get into their car, took them to a lot and sexually assaulted them. The social alarm was enormous. It was urgent to find the culprits. How did you get to Tommouhi and Mounib?
In the trial for one of the rapes, a police sub-inspector explained that one night he was on duty and received a note warning of the wave of rapes that various Catalan towns were suffering. While he was holding that note in his left hand, another note arrived, which he was holding in his right, from the register of hotel and guesthouse clients, and he noticed the identity of a man who had just stayed at a guesthouse in Terrassa, where there had been Such a sexual assault. He was a Moroccan: Ahmed Tommouhi. Neither short nor lazy, the agent organized a device for the arrest of that man, then 40 years old and employed in construction. When they took him a few hours later to testify in court, he passed the girls who had denounced a rape. At that time, there was no differentiated access for victims and alleged aggressors in those judicial offices.
Tommouhi was charged along with his compatriot Abderrazak Mounib, whom he always denied knowing. Mounib suffered from testicular atrophy that – his defense alleged at the time – prevented him from having sexual relations. Tommouhi always denied knowing how to drive, but that was always a difficult point to prove in court.
In total they were involved in five legal proceedings. In two of them (occurred in Tarragona and Terrassa) the scientific police were unable to obtain biological remains of the attacker. A fifth case resulted in the acquittal of Tommouhi and Mounib, precisely because the victims not only did not recognize them but also claimed that, although they looked reasonably similar, they were not the culprits. The different cases placed tens of years in prison on Tommouhi and Mounib, although the legislation left the maximum of compliance at 30, which was 15 with the redemptions in force at the time.
The victim on whom García Carbonell left remains, and who initially recognized Tommouhi, admitted years later in an interview in El País that he had been wrong, and apologized to Tommouhi. Mounib was already dead. His testimony, and that of the journalist Braulio García Jaén, who published an extensive investigation on the matter, have been key in the decision of the Supreme Court.
In theory, Tommouhi could now consider the demand for financial compensation for the time spent in prison wrongly, although in 2001 he already received compensation when the sentence was annulled when García Carbonell's authorship was discovered in one of the cases attributed to him. .
“This case opens up an unprecedented perspective,” explains a Barcelona lawyer, “because the prison time is the same, but there are two errors: should the state pay again? The mistake exists." Tommouhi received around 108,500 euros that time, a third of which went to pay his lawyers.
"I no longer have a life or anything," he explained to the victim to this newspaper, "I live with my brother and he supports me, I have never been able to work since I got out of jail." Tommouhi has 4 children. His wife and his daughter, whom he has not seen for thirty years, live in Nador, in Morocco, where he was born, he does not know exactly what day. It was in 1951, "but Franco ruled and that was not taken care of, I don't have a birthday." Since he was released from prison, he has also lived with his son Khalid, who was 11 years old when he entered prison for the first time, in 1991. "I am only angry with the judges, they have destroyed my life", he added.
“From my perspective, the appearance in the press of the image of a defendant should invalidate the visual recognition test”, explains a criminal lawyer from Barcelona, “but they are a useful and reliable method for the police if there is no contamination.
David Aineto, also a criminal lawyer, believes that “the line-up is established in the Criminal Procedure Law, it is a useful and legally established tool, but in my opinion it is more for the investigation process than for establishing a sentence. It is not an objective test by itself. From my point of view it should be proof of support”. A criminal law professor who prefers to remain anonymous holds up a mirror: “It just so happened that that man was an Arab, possibly racial bias played a role here. Would justice have acted in the same way, without that social pressure at that time, if the defendant had been, for example, any middle-class professional from the Eixample?
