The Dellys road did not merely link one village to the next. Between Maison-Carrée and Reghaïa, the Gazette des Tribunaux describes a highway where several wayfarers had already fallen victim to highwaymen, and where the patrols posted near a junction had not always succeeded in preventing ambushes. On August 30, 1861, Salomon May, twenty-five years of age, set out from Hussein-Dey in a cart laden with meat. He was to spend the night at Rouïba. A few hours later, he would be found bleeding in a ditch, and a small coin purse that his family claimed to have entrusted to him would become one of the central exhibits around which the prosecution built its case.
May was employed by the butcher Mantout, his brother-in-law. Toward nine o’clock in the evening, he took the road toward Maison-Blanche, his goods concealed beneath a canvas sheet. He carried no firearm. Beneath the bench cushion lay a meat saw and a sharpening steel—tools of his trade that the court report also refers to as his “butcher’s steel.” The distinction is material: the gazette does not depict a traveler armed for self-defense, but an artisan carrying the instruments of his daily labor.
Around ten o’clock, his cart reached Maison-Carrée; half an hour later, it passed through the hamlet of Retour-de-la-Chasse. A short distance beyond, a military guard post caught sight of his lantern upon the road. Presently, according to the Gazette, cries pierced the night, drawing the soldiers' attention. The journal asserts that they understood a traveler was under attack, yet, being unarmed, they ran to alert the town clerk. By the time assistance arrived, the assailants had vanished. The cart had been thrust into a ditch, the horse still harnessed to it. In another ditch lay May, covered in wounds to his head and face.
He was conveyed to the inn at Retour-de-la-Chasse. Dr. Payn arrived around two o’clock in the morning and found him scarcely able to speak. He dressed his injuries; a few disjointed words allowed the physician to catch the name of Saïd, then that of Kouba, along with the impression that several men had taken part in the ambush. This initial utterance possessed neither the clarity of a formal deposition nor the precision of an identification. The Gazette presents it as the murmur of a grievously wounded man, as yet incapable of responding to the interrogatories of the examining magistrate.
At daybreak, investigators examined the scene. The account records three broad pools of blood and bare footprints encircling the highway. May’s brother supplied a more singular piece of intelligence: a purse containing, by his account, two francs in silver coin had left Hussein-Dey with the wounded carter and was no longer among his effects. The newspaper provides no exhaustive inventory of the missing property, but mentions as well a tobacco pouch, a silver watch with its charm, the meat saw, and the sharpening steel. The travel purse was soon to direct the inquiry toward two men; it remained, however, merely one fragment among many, and not the entire stage of the crime.
On August 31, two men were noticed picking prickly pears on the Haouch El Bey estate. Brought before the sheikh of Rassauta, they bore, according to the journal, traces of blood upon the garments of one of them. A search brought to light a coin purse that the report matched to the description given by May’s brother. The man to whom it was attributed, Abd el Nebi, maintained that he had purchased it two months earlier from an itinerant peddler whom he could not precisely name. Both men were taken into custody. The Gazette portrays them as the accused in the affair; yet Salomon had spoken of at least five assailants, and the other individuals he claimed to have seen never stood beside them in the dock.
The interval separating the assault from the trial lent the object its narrative power. May’s brother, sister, and brother-in-law recognized the purse during the preliminary investigation. The wounded man himself could not be examined until September 18, when his faculties had sufficiently recovered. Upon beholding the purse, he declared that it belonged to him and that his sister had placed the money within it for his journey. In open court, he added that he had won the purse at a roulette wheel in Hussein-Dey; the report does not treat these two particulars as contradictory. A month later, on October 11, during a confrontation with Abd el Nebi, he pointed out, prior to opening it, the exact place where an inner seam must be undone; the Gazette reports that the detail was verified. In the published chronicle, this precision binds the object discovered at the time of the arrest to an intimate memory of the traveler.
The other material exhibit consisted of the blood observed upon Abd el Nebi’s clothing. He ascribed it to a wound on the left side of his chest sustained some a fortnight prior. The gazette notes that he had been hospitalized from August 21 to 24; an orderly asserted that his garments were unsoiled while he was in the infirmary. A physician who inspected the stains on September 1 judged them to be recent. Other doctors and the hospital apothecary subsequently took part in a forensic examination. The Gazette presents their findings as an affirmation of the bloodstains, going so far as to describe upon the burnous the nearly distinguishable imprint of May’s fingers. It reproduces, however, neither a medical report nor the method of examination: this imprint belongs to the journalist's narrative, not to an exhibit that the modern reader might scrutinize here.
The two men offered alibis. Abd el Nebi claimed to have spent the entire night in a Moorish café near Harrach before setting out in the morning toward the plain with Ali ben Saïd. The majority of the persons whose testimony he invoked reportedly contradicted this version, according to the account, with the exception of one witness whom the reporter deemed suspicious. Ali ben Saïd likewise asserted an alternative presence for that night; the Gazette summarizes the contradiction offered by a witness without detailing his actual timetable. Nothing allows us to transform these abridgments into complete interrogatories: we remain ignorant of the exact questions, the precise phrasing, and the explanations the accused may have offered before the bench.
At the confrontation, May first designated Abd el Nebi as the man upon whom he had leaped after receiving the blows. He specified that he had not known him prior to that night, yet affirmed he recognized him as the man with whom he had grappled. It was with regard to Ali ben Saïd that he claimed prior acquaintance: he stated he had frequently seen him at Hussein-Dey and Kouba, identifying him as the assailant who had seized him by the throat. The question of identification in the dark was raised at the bar. May replied that the night had grown clearer near Maison-Carrée and that his lantern had remained alight until his fall. This reply constitutes reported testimony, not an independent assessment of nocturnal visibility.
At the bar, he recounted the initial appearance of three men alongside his cart, followed by the blows that struck him down. He stated that he had risen, seized his steel, and thrown himself upon one of the attackers while another throttled him. The accused denied being present. When May named Ali ben Saïd, the latter protested; the journalist then records the wounded man’s emotion and fury, though such an outburst cannot stand in place of an objective review of his identification. May added that the aggressors numbered at least five, detailing the roles he assigned to each. This figure recalls an essential limitation of the trial as recorded in the press: only two men stood before the court.
Dr. Payn confirmed having found May at the inn, grievously hurt, and having heard him repeat the name of Saïd, followed by that of Kouba. The other witnesses reportedly confirmed the victim’s statements in general terms. Advocate General Pierrey prosecuted the case; Maîtres Villermoz and Robe conducted the defense. The Gazette praises their eloquence, yet preserves neither their pleadings nor the legal debate. Its narrative is a courtroom chronicle, not an unabridged transcript of the proceedings. It leaves little room for witness hesitation, while preserving enough detail to reveal the chain of inferences upon which the prosecution rested: the purse, the stained garments, the disputed alibis, and, above all, May’s identification.
At the close of the sessions of January 14 and 15, 1862, the report states that the accused were found guilty of “premeditated homicide.” It attributes the death penalty to Abd el Nebi and penal servitude for life to Ali ben Saïd. The phrase “premeditated homicide” is startling in an article where May testified in the flesh: it may represent a journalistic abbreviation or an erratum. Lacking the original ruling, we cannot ascertain the precise statutory classification. The article offers no separate verdict on the robbery announced in its headline, nor does it recount any subsequent appeal or the execution of the sentences. One must not, therefore, conflate what the newspaper describes of the ambush with each formal criminal charge ultimately retained: the reported decision addresses premeditated homicide, and the penalties differ.
The Gazette’s account opens with the specter of highwaymen and closes upon an exemplary punishment. Between the two, the surviving victim becomes the witness capable of identifying two men, while the recovered articles and bloodstains are brought forth to substantiate that recognition. The colonial tone of the gazette frequently opposes the categories of “Europeans” and “indigenous subjects,” and its physical portrayal of the accused proves nothing of their guilt; it belongs to the lens of that era, and I do not reproduce it here. What can be established is far more circumscribed: a contemporary chronicle recording two verdicts, two sentences, and an investigation of which several elements remain entirely beyond our view.