Moroccan Teen’s Cold Case Resurfaces: Social Media Demands Justice for Thami Bennani

The case of Thami Bennani’s disappearance is resurfacing. Moroccan YouTuber Safaa recently posted a video on YouTube that has garnered over 2.2 million views in just four days. Many internet users have immersed themselves in the story of this young man who disappeared nearly 15 years ago. Many comments have been posted under the video. Twitter and other social media quickly took over. The hashtag #JusticepourThamiBennani was launched to help Hayat Alami, Thami’s mother, solve this case and mourn. Artists, athletes, journalists, influencers and the general public support the campaign.

Other initiatives have also been taken: pages dedicated to Thami Bennani to support the family, the launch of a campaign to ask internet users to change their profile pictures to that of Thami, in order to give more visibility to the case. On Monday, Hayat Alami said she had received a death threat by phone. "I take you all for maternal love. You are the right hand with which I search in the darkness and thanks to the divine power and you I will eventually uncover the luminous breaches," she tweeted to reassure her supporters.

The facts date back to March 14, 2007. That day, Thami, then 17 years old, had accompanied his high school classmates on a car trip to Paloma beach, on the outskirts of Casablanca. The group was supposed to celebrate one of their birthdays that evening. Things did not go as planned. The young teenager died of an overdose. His classmates would have "burned" his body in order to conceal his identity and "thrown" him into the sea. The young man’s body was discovered by a farmer plowing his field. The body had then been placed in the morgue as an unidentified person, based on the medical examiner’s report which had confirmed the death by overdose, and then buried a few years later without being identified.

But the mother persisted in claiming that it was not her son’s body until 2019, when an investigation by the national judicial police brigade revealed a telephone call between two of the young man’s friends announcing the death of the high school student from an overdose. Hayat Alami had managed to gather new evidence to implicate the three suspects in this case. The latter had been placed in pre-trial detention. Today, Thami’s mother continues to fight to establish the truth.