Spain’s Supreme Court has overturned the wrongful rape conviction of a Moroccan mason who spent 15 years in prison and bore a physical resemblance to the real perpetrator, the Spanish judiciary said on Thursday.
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The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, one of Spain’s highest courts, “overturned the judgment of the Provincial Court (Regional Supreme Criminal Court, ed.) of Barcelona of September 23, 1992, which sentenced a man to a total of 24 years in prison.” for rape and assault”, the Spanish judiciary specifies in a press release.
After examining the appeal of Ahmed Toummouhi, who was released from prison in 2006, the court overturned his conviction on the basis of new elements, including expert evidence, which had not been brought to the attention of the court at the time of the trial.
In those reports, we learn that “semen found on the assaulted woman’s underwear did not match the defendant’s genetic markers,” the press release said.
The Spanish judiciary adds that these reports were drawn up in 1992, but that “the experts did not come to testify at the hearing and the court did not interrupt the process to summon them again”.
Ahmed Toummouhi and another unknown Moroccan, who died of a heart attack in prison in 2000, were arrested after a series of rapes in Catalonia, northeast Spain, in the early 1990s.
The real perpetrator, a Spanish national who bore a physical resemblance to Ahmed Toummouhi, was arrested a few years later.
In an interview published in El País daily in February 2022, one of the victims, aged 14 at the time of the events, had called for justice for the wrongly accused Ahmed Toummouhi.