To understand his trajectory, the court revisited his childhood. Ahmed Touloub was born in 1952 into a modest Moroccan Berber family. He was 8 when his father left agricultural work and took the family to Oran, in Algeria, where he invested in a small grocery store.
The question runs through the hearing. How could this father have failed to intervene in the face of chronic violence that turned deadly? Since the opening of his trial, he seems relegated to the role of an extra. He even gives the appearance of falling asleep.
At the start of the proceedings, the presiding judge asked him how he spends his days. The man in his seventies is now housed by the former husband of his eldest daughter, in a small apartment in Seine-Saint-Denis.
In 1973, Ahmed Touloub was 21. He likewise had no choice in his wife, who gave birth to a daughter that year. In 1980, he left alone for France to work.
He invested in a small grocery store in Vitry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne). In 1982, he brought over his wife and their two daughters, born in 1978 and 1981. She became pregnant with their third daughter, Inass, who was born in July 1983 in Casablanca.
The accounts diverge, as often in this trial. The outcome, however, is clear: in the weeks that followed, Ahmed Touloub divorced his first wife and married the 22-year-old schoolteacher. The mother's abuse of Inass had already begun.
Living conditions remained modest, especially in Puteaux (Hauts-de-Seine), where the family moved in 1985, into the back room of a small grocery store that would become a butcher's shop, run by the father.
The personality investigator notes that"his entire life as a husband and father is marked by this submission."The man says he always dreaded his wife's"outbursts,"also described by his children. According to him, these fits of violence turn against herself, against her children and against him.
During the night, he loads the car. The eldest gets in the front, his wife in the back with the six children. Inass's body is beside her: this detail matches in both versions given by the defendants. He specifies that he took the child's pulse to check that she was indeed dead.