Down and Out in Agadir

Souss · Agadir · Inezgane · Chtouka-Aït Baha · 2017–2018 · Bonus

This episode describes the killing of sleeping, homeless victims by blunt force. Listener discretion advised.

By the middle of January 2018 the men sleeping rough around Agadir had worked out that someone was killing them in their sleep. There was nowhere else to sleep.

The first body turned up on 8 January, near a weekly market in Chtouka-Aït Baha. By the twenty-fourth there were seven, across Agadir, Inezgane, Aït Melloul and Lqliaa, and the prefecture had called an emergency meeting of the police and gendarmerie — partly to catch him, partly to calm the panic among the people he was hunting. The method never varied. He waited until they were asleep, crushed the skull with a large stone, and in several cases piled rags over what he left.

He was stopped on the evening of 10 March 2018 at a routine checkpoint, riding in a taxi toward Inezgane, apparently on his way to do it again; DNA from two scenes matched him. He was about twenty-nine, from Beni Mellal, and had been homeless himself since 2007. He said nothing under questioning, and he has never been publicly named. There is no reported trial, no verdict and no sentence. The record stops at the arrest.