Marrakech – Spain’s Supreme Court has ordered the state to pay €2.5 million to Ahmed Tommouhi, a Moroccan construction worker who spent nearly two decades behind bars for rapes he did not commit. The ruling, issued Thursday, declared that Tommouhi was the victim of an “unequivocal and qualified” judicial error.
The decision reverses a lower court ruling that had denied Tommouhi any compensation. The Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s central criminal court, had upheld the Justice Ministry’s refusal to indemnify him, arguing no “gross or evident” judicial error had occurred. The Supreme Court’s administrative chamber disagreed.
Tommouhi, now 75, was first arrested in November 1991 in Catalonia. He was convicted of multiple sexual assaults across the provinces of Barcelona and Tarragona. The Audiencia Provincial de Barcelona sentenced him in September 1992 to 24 years in prison for two counts of rape and two minor assault charges.
The Audiencia Provincial de Tarragona later handed him a sentence exceeding 100 years for additional rapes. A separate conviction for events in Olesa de Montserrat carried 51 years for rape, robbery, and kidnapping.
The convictions rested almost entirely on eyewitness identification by the victims. One victim later acknowledged she had been wrong in identifying Tommouhi.
What the sentencing courts failed to consider was a forensic report prepared by Barcelona’s Scientific Police in 1992. The report analyzed semen found on the clothing of one of the victims. It concluded the biological sample did not match Tommouhi’s genetic profile. Despite being formally admitted into the case file, this evidence was never evaluated by the judges who convicted him.
The Supreme Court’s ruling, drafted by Justice Carlos Lesmes, former president of Spain’s General Council of the Judiciary, found that this omission broke “the logical process of forming judicial conviction.” The court stated the error was “decisive” in keeping Tommouhi imprisoned “for an extraordinarily prolonged period.”
Tommouhi remained in custody from November 1991 until April 2009, having served more than three-quarters of his sentence. He spent roughly 15 years in prison and an additional three years under conditional release.
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His path to exoneration was long and fragmented. The Supreme Court annulled his first conviction in 1997. But the remaining sentences stood for decades. It was not until 2023 that the high court overturned his second conviction, related to the events in Cornellá. His final conviction was annulled in December 2025.
A key development in the case came when Spanish police arrested another man, Antonio G.C., who bore a strong physical resemblance to Tommouhi. DNA evidence confirmed that the man had committed at least one of the rapes originally attributed to the Moroccan worker. However, biological samples from the other cases had not been preserved, leaving the remaining charges unresolved for years.
Tommouhi was not the only one to suffer. His compatriot Abderrazak M., accused alongside him, died of a heart attack in prison in 2000. He, too, had maintained his innocence and refused an offered settlement of 18 million pesetas after one of his convictions was annulled.
Tommouhi himself rejected a pardon requested on his behalf in 1999 by José María Mena, then Catalonia’s chief prosecutor. Tommouhi’s position was clear: pardons are for the guilty, and he was innocent.
The Supreme Court set the compensation at €2.5 million, below the €3.645 million Tommouhi had claimed. The court said the nearly 18-year deprivation of liberty placed the case “on a plane of exceptional gravity.” The prolonged imprisonment, it stated, caused a “progressive intensification of moral suffering, loss of life opportunities, and impact on the personality of the affected person” that far exceeded ordinary cases of wrongful detention.
The ruling also establishes a significant legal precedent in Spain. The court held that while a successful revision appeal does not automatically entitle someone to state compensation, it can serve as the basis for such a claim when the revision ruling itself reveals, “in a direct, clear, and unequivocal manner,” a qualified judicial error. This opens a new path for indemnification in what the court described as “exceptional” cases.
The court did reject one of Tommouhi’s requests. He had asked for a formal declaration of “grave fault” against the magistrates who originally convicted him. The Supreme Court ruled that the question fell outside the scope of the proceedings.
