Aisha El Bannoudi’s scream sounds desperate. She suffers inhumane pain. “Someone has poured fire on me,” she yells to the operator. She had just been doused with a flammable liquid and half of her body had burned. The 30-year-old woman lost consciousness but, somehow, she regained it and managed to call emergencies and her father-in-law. She speaks of two black shadows that were in her house and attacked her while her seven-month-old baby slept in the crib. It happened in Sevilla la Nueva (Madrid) on February 2. In the following five months, she would undergo about fifty operations.
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This July 17, she died in the hospital after being unable to overcome the sequelae. The Government Delegation against Gender Violence considers her the 29th victim so far this year.
By that day, her husband was already in prison along with the two hitmen he allegedly hired to execute the mother of his three children. A traffic camera captured the woman’s last minutes alive. Aisha left home shortly before nine in the morning and took her two older children to school. Her neighbors would later recall to the Guardia Civil the typical commotion of two small children getting ready to go out.
It was raining that day and Aisha used to leave the baby in the crib during the few minutes it took her to drop off her older siblings at school. She didn’t know that her killers were already waiting at her door, inside a white Citroen, owned by her husband. The Guardia Civil suspects that it was the husband himself, Ibrahim B., who had given the keys to the hitmen, Anderson M. and Julio M., to kill Aisha. According to the police reconstruction, the alleged murderers left her unconscious with a beating that disfigured her face and then set her on fire. In the victim’s clothes, the Guardia Civil found toluene, a powerful solvent that, they conclude, acted as an “accelerant to deliberately end the victim’s life.”
Shortly after the attack, Ibrahim himself arrived at the house. One of the intervening paramedics mentioned that she had noticed the man was unusually calm considering the brutality of the scene. Ibrahim, owner of two construction and hairdressing companies, told the agents that he had left early in the morning for his job, a construction site in Villanueva de la Cañada. He was not lying, but he had omitted that, before leaving, he had guided the hitmen in his Porsche Cayenne to the door of his own home, according to the case summary. Traffic cameras show this sequence, just as they later capture the image of one of the alleged murderers at the wheel. Another camera captures the agitated escape of the alleged perpetrators of the act. For the Guardia Civil, all this evidence shows a plan “hatched and premeditated” by Ibrahim to end his wife’s life.
Guardia Civil investigators continued to unravel Aisha’s life and who could have harmed a “much-loved” woman who spent her days caring for her three children. “Anyone you ask will tell you she was a great person,” says her brother Hamza. It was her own family that uncovered a scene that put all the focus on Ibrahim.
Aisha’s brothers had heard rumors that their brother-in-law was cheating on their sister. With the aim of catching him red-handed, they set a trap for him and pretended to be a woman to arrange a date. He fell for it and the brothers reprimanded him harshly, but decided not to tell Aisha anything. Even so, she eventually found out about Ibrahim’s affairs and had communicated her intention to separate. “He couldn’t get over a divorce, that she would stay in the house with the children, he couldn’t tolerate that,” says Miguel Ángel Benito, the family’s lawyer. In addition, investigators have discovered that just nine days before the attack, the alleged instigator of the crime had taken out home insurance, from which he collected more than 3,000 euros shortly after for the damage caused by the fire.
“Let everything be known, let justice be done, let what they did to my sister be known,” says Hamza, Aicha’s brother. The whole family lives with tremendous pain at Aicha’s loss and is now dedicated to caring for the three orphans their sister leaves behind. The youngest has just turned one year old.
The investigation has uncovered a morbid homicidal intent. According to the evidence collected, Ibrahim spoke on the phone with a woman to try to attack Aisha again while she was hospitalized. “Today it’s not possible, she has dressings,” he tells his interlocutor. Investigators believed the threat was so imminent that they asked the judge to prevent the daily two-hour visits the victim could receive in her room.
In the five months she was hospitalized, she was able to testify before the guards, but she never did so before the judge investigating the case. Her brothers have spoken for her and have said that the woman even recorded her husband at home without her knowing because she felt “in danger.” They claim that their sister sent them a single-view video in which he is seen pouring something into her coffee while talking on speakerphone with a woman to whom he says: “Pray that this bitch drinks it.” Aisha’s phone was seriously damaged during the attack. Despite this fear, Aisha had never reported her husband.
On March 18, the Guardia Civil arrested the man who had been married to the victim for 10 years and also the two accomplices he allegedly hired to end her life. Her family is now traveling to her native Morocco to say goodbye.
