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Rabat – A court in Rabat has ruled out a terror motive in the murder of a Frenchwoman in Tiznit, a town in the west coast of the Moroccan region of Souss-Massa.
The police report on the case suggests that the main suspect, who has been in custody as part of the investigation, had been suffering from mental issues.
The murder took place in January and the police almost immediately identified and arrested the 31-year-old suspect for intentional homicide.
A surveillance camera showed the man fatally stabbing his victim, whom the police identified as a 79-year-old French woman, with a knife before fleeing the scene.
After arresting the primary suspect, the police charged him with attempts to physically attack two other tourists in a cafe in the city of Agadir, where he was arrested.
Subsequently, the attorney general at the Rabat Court of Appeal assigned the murder case to the Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations (BCIJ).
However, preliminary investigations led security sources to rule out the possibility of a terror motive in the crime, according to a recent news report.
In January, the Moroccan news outlet Le360 reported that police would most likely rule out a terror motive in the case because of the suspect’s medical history and lack of links to radical groups.
Since the 2003 Casablanca attacks that killed 45 people, including 12 of the 14 bombers who carried out the suicide attacks, Morocco has implemented a largely effective and widely applauded counter-terrorism approach.
Over the past decade, the country has only witnessed two terrorist attacks after the Casablanca tragedy. The first, a bomb attack in the main square of Marrakech in 2014, killed 15 people – including 10 tourists – and injured about 20.
The second – and latest – took place in 2018, when the BCIJ arrested four ISIS-linked terrorists who killed two Scandinavian tourists in Imlil, a small village in the High Atlas Mountains region.
Morocco has been intensifying efforts to “fight against terrorism in all its forms.”
Since the creation of the BCIJ in 2015, Moroccan security forces have dismantled over 83 terror cells, including 77 ISIS-affiliated groups. The BCIJ has also arrested to date over 1,374 people for links to terrorist groups.
