Maria Traspaderne |
Casablanca (Morocco) (EFE).- If he can, Fiach Mesbah takes another street to avoid passing in front of the “black hole”. This is how he calls Casa de España, where on May 16, 2003 he was playing bingo with six friends when his world turned upside down: “Five left, two stayed.”
Twenty years after the worst jihadist attacks in Morocco, which left 45 dead (including twelve suicide bombers) in different parts of the city of Casablanca, for Fiach it is “as if it were yesterday.” Disbelief and pain still accompany the victims, condemned to live with unanswered whys.
Of the Casa de España, that high-rise building with a large terrace frequented by Moroccans and Spaniards, all that remains is its wine-coloured metal entrance door, a bell and the street number, 25, painted on it.
Behind it, families no longer gather to play bingo, eat and drink. Now there is a huge half-finished building that has not been finished. They say it will be a student residence, but no one knows for sure. There, 24 people died when three terrorists entered and blew themselves up after beheading the doorman.
“I will never forgive them”
A dapper Fiach, 69, in a blue hat, matching shirt, suit and scarf, reminisces about every hour of that day. At four in the afternoon, he told EFE in a bar in front of the building, he met in a cafe with some friends. “I was kind of sad, I don’t know why, and I told them: ‘I’m going home’”. But they convinced him to go to that other “House”. It was six o’clock.
He sat down with six friends and they started playing bingo. “We were bent over our cardboard, crossing out the numbers, when the explosion went off. Then there was a second and a third. Two iron bars got into my eye and I passed out.” Next to her was “the table of the Spaniards”, of which four died. It was after ten at night.
“From my table, only a friend and I survived,” he says. And every time they see each other, they cry. Fiach also began “an ordeal” of seven operations, a shattered eye, daily visits to the hospital for four years, nightmares and shocks even when faced with loud noises. But perhaps the worst thing was unemployment.
He worked as a representative for two French companies and was automatically without a job. “I went on to live in misery.” In Morocco, there were no foreseen compensations for the victims of terrorism at that time and those of May 16 were pioneers.
They had to fight and until 2013 justice did not compensate them. They were amounts, says Rachid, “insignificant compared to the damage.” For this reason, he asks for more help to be able to give his 13-year-old son a good education.
Regarding the terrorists, he believes that “they were so young that they did not know what they were doing.” Twelve between the ages of 20 and 23 were immolated in the Casa de España, in an Italian restaurant, in a Jewish cultural center, in a luxury hotel and in a Jewish cemetery. Fiach tries to understand.
- “In the bottom of me, never. Because we were normal, calm people, and they have changed our lives. I will never forgive them. They broke my body and my heart.”
After the interview, Fiach planned to return to his house on the outskirts of Casablanca, but remembering May 16, 2003 is not free. In his place, he decides to lose himself, with his blue hat, in the bustle of Casablanca: “I need to rest my mind.”
“Because? What have we done?”
At the Casablanca Martyrs Cemetery, every Friday she can, Souad El Khammal visits her husband and son. She tells them, mentally, the things that happen to her. She asks them to help her. “I stay looking at them, I talk to them and that relieves me a lot. Sometimes I would like to stay with them.”
Sitting on a stone bench at the entrance to the cemetery, dressed in yellow with a matching scarf that she puts on her head “out of respect for the place,” Souad recounts “the saddest and most difficult day” of her life.
On May 16, 20 years ago, she and her 14-year-old daughter were in Paris to collect a school award. “We were very proud of her,” she says. Her husband, Abdeluahed, had stayed in Casablanca with her 17-year-old son, Tayib.
Abdeluahed was killed in the first explosion and Tajib was left in a coma as a result of the second. “My son was away from my husband’s table, but instead of going out like the others, he decided to go see his father. Then the second explosion occurred.
She found out the next day very soon on television. “I started calling my husband and he didn’t answer, I called my son and he didn’t answer either.” Then the news reached him.
“I returned home knowing that I would never see Abdeluahed again, who had accompanied me to the airport three days earlier, and hoping to keep my son.” But Tajib died a week later.
Twenty years have passed and the pain is still there, says Souad quietly, because “one never forgets the loves of one’s life.”
Since then, like Fiach, Souad has tried to understand. “Because? What have we done?” she asks on air. She has preferred not to “put a face” on the murderers, although she reads everything she can about terrorism.
“It is the extreme of human thought, to push someone to kill themselves.” After two decades, she still can’t understand: “I would have to get inside her head, and I can’t.”