A Death in Tangier

Tangier · Béni Makada · 2020 · Recent

This episode concerns the abduction, rape and murder of an eleven-year-old child. It is the hardest hour of the season, and we would not blame you for skipping it.

On 7 September 2020 an eleven-year-old boy was sent out to the pharmacy near his home in Béni Makada, in Tangier. He did not come back.

For four days the neighbourhood searched for Adnane Bouchouf. What broke the case was a shop’s street camera: footage recorded the day after he disappeared showed a grown man in conversation with the boy, and then the two of them walking away together. The man was twenty-four, worked in the city’s industrial zone, and lived a few doors from the family. He confessed, and on the night of 11 September he took police to the garden where he had buried Adnane — a short walk from the streets the search parties had been standing in all week.

He was sentenced to death in January 2021 by the criminal chamber of the Tangier Court of Appeal, the sentence was upheld that April, and the Court of Cassation confirmed it in January 2022. Moroccan outlets have never published his name. What the case did produce was the loudest argument the country has had about capital punishment in a generation — hundreds of thousands of people signing to demand the sentence, and a father who said afterwards that a death sentence was not the same thing as a son.