A Mother Wonders, Why?
SIDI MOUMEN, MOROCCO--Two years ago, her son walked into the Casa de Espana, a busy Spanish restaurant and club in Casablanca, and blew himself up. One moment, people were dining or playing bingo; the next, more than 20 lay dead or fatally wounded--the largest single toll of May 16, 2003, when a hotel, an Italian restaurant, a Jewish club, and a Jewish cemetery in the city were also targeted. But even with two sad years to contemplate her son's last act, Zahra Cherif says she doesn't know what turned this unemployed shoe-factory worker who was ever "calm, very respectful" into a terrorist.
"I never witnessed a change," she says tearfully. "There was no goodbye, no note." Dressed in a beige-and-pink dress and scarf, Cherif, not surprisingly, appears careworn--older than her 59 years. She once earned a living by embroidering gowns worn at weddings and formal occasions, but she no longer works. She lives alone in the two-room shanty where her son was raised. A plastic sheet taped over the lone window pops in and out with the breeze. Since May 16, the neighbors have shunned her.
Mystery man. The motives of her son, Abdelfettah Bouliqdane, remain a mystery, she says. At 27, Bouliqdane was experiencing some turmoil, separated from his wife and having quit his job. He was a good student but had dropped out of high school, Cherif recalls, and he prayed at a local mosque but showed no sign of religious extremism. "He never expressed ambition," she says of her son, who spent evenings on the couch with her watching television.
Now, her chief worry is Bouliqdane's 6-year-old son, Abdelrahman. He lives in another shantytown with his mother but, she says, can't attend school because the police have not returned the boy's identity papers. He was told his father died of an illness, but when he visited his grandmother here, she says, a neighbor shouted, "This is the terrorist's boy!" He has some playmates, but between the poverty and the lack of schooling, things look bleak. Says Cherif, "We don't want to lose him as he lost his father."
This story appears in the May 9, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.