At daybreak, Father Gazel was unable to rise. On the night of March 26, 1865, he had set out from Mascara to walk along the road to Oran, accompanied by his sister and a young lad named Michel Pozzuelo. After a short while, his two companions, overcome with fatigue, left him to proceed alone. Scarcely had he taken two hundred paces, the Gazette reports, when a blow struck behind his head felled him to the ground, before he could either see or hear his assailant.
Towards the middle of the night, he regained consciousness in a field bordering the road. He endeavoured to stand, failed, and tried again with the morning light. A wigmaker from Mascara named Portai came upon him and helped him back to his dwelling. The dispatch describes severe injuries inflicted by a blunt instrument, and notes the theft of a walking cane, two knives, and a rosary terminating in a silver cross.
In early January 1867, six men stood in the dock before the Mostaganem Assize Court. The correspondence published on January 23 recounts three days of hearings, forty-four witnesses called by the prosecution, a verdict of guilty against all six, and sentences ranging from five years’ imprisonment to the penalty of death. It weaves the charges out of confidential disclosures and recovered objects, yet it represents neither the investigating magistrate’s dossier nor an unabridged transcript of the proceedings.
The Indictment Chamber of Algiers had committed the prisoners to the assizes on October 3, 1866. The bill of indictment laid four murders, three attempted murders, one case of arson, and several robberies with violence to their charge. Nonetheless, in the surviving run of printed pages, the report gives particulars of only three deceased victims: Francisco Anton, Joseph Bonnet, and Pierre Arnaud. The discrepancy between the number announced and the cases detailed remains unexplained; no fourth case is supplied here. The printed list of the accused gives the names of Bou Aza ould El Abdelli, aged twenty-eight; Djelloul ben Aouadja, aged thirty-six; Snoussi ben Fergoug, aged thirty; Brahim ben Moktar, aged thirty-two; Mohamed ben Medjadji, aged thirty-eight; and lastly Mouffog ould Dabo bel Hadj, aged twenty-four.
The correspondent’s opening is already an act of interpretation. He depicts the six men as a confederacy that had spread “terror” throughout the environs of Mascara, portraying the outrages as a peril hanging over the European inhabitants and colonial estates. Further on, the prosecution appeals for the protection of Algerian settlers. Such vocabulary belongs properly to the journal and the public prosecutor; the chronicler must leave it plain to see, without confounding it with an impartial description of the country.
The first thread of the judicial inquiry was the testimony of Kheira bent M’hamed ben Safi. The newspaper describes her as having ties to Bou Aza and being privy to his secrets; this liaison, and the measure of liberty she enjoyed within it, are known solely through the reporter’s pen. The article adds that Djelloul, having quit his father’s house following a dispute on June 4, 1865, had fallen in with Bou Aza and become his confederate. Both men, once apprehended, were said to have made revelations concerning the imputed crimes.
Touching the assault upon Father Gazel, Kheira stated she had learned from Bou Aza that he, Snoussi, Brahim, and Mohamed were the perpetrators. Djelloul was said to have made an initial statement to the same effect, only to retract it at the close of the preliminary inquiry. The correspondent matches these versions with the depositions of Marichi and Jautant, who stated they had passed four men on the road and subsequently seen the priest walking towards the spot where the group was assembled.
The stolen rosary was never recovered. According to Kheira and Djelloul, it should have been found at the douar of El Hazzat, but searches proved fruitless. The Gazette records neither the seizure of the article nor any formal admission of the theft.
The report then turns to the death of Francisco Anton, a domestic servant in the employ of Ramon Belso. The printed text dates the discovery of his corpse to May 23, 1855, yet embeds the event in the series of outrages of 1865 and notes that Anton had gone missing on the preceding May 19. This discrepancy exists within the printed facsimile itself; as no source consulted allows it to be reconciled, the date cannot be corrected in silence. The corpse, discovered in a barley field near the Oran road, was too far decomposed for the physician to specify the nature of the wounds.
According to the hearsay narrative related to Kheira, Anton was riding a mare when a party of men accosted him to ask for tobacco. Mohamed ben Medjadji was said to have felled him with a bludgeon, whereupon Bou Aza slit his throat. The body was purportedly left in the field, and Mohamed was said to have led the mare away before abandoning her along the road. Djelloul was reported to have given a similar account, without mentioning Snoussi. The beast was discovered wandering near Cocheron, her saddle and bridle gone. The Gazette presents this discovery as corroborating the confessions, without adducing any formal police report to that effect.
On that same day, according to the article, the bodies of Joseph Bonnet and Pierre Arnaud were found. They had set out from Sidi-bel-Abbès with a third companion to fish on the Oued-el-Haman. Bonnet and Arnaud had departed to sell their catch at the Mascara market; they were discovered dead near Saint-André. The newspaper details numerous wounds, blows dealt with stones, and gashes to the throat. Kheira and Djelloul reportedly imputed these slayings to Bou Aza, Snoussi, Brahim, and Mohamed; the Gazette observes that certain findings of the medical officer agreed with a portion of Djelloul’s statement. It also reports a second confidential admission attributed to Snoussi, transmitted through Kheira’s brother.
The indictments did not concern fatal attacks alone. In the night of April 29 to 30, a fire consumed a wooden shanty used by the workmen of a Mascara market contractor. Kheira and Djelloul reportedly named Bou Aza as the author of the arson, preceded by the theft of a pair of Arab slippers. One slipper was later found near the scene of an assault upon Messaoud Sananès; a shoemaker declared he had crafted it for Safi ben Safi, but the latter refused to acknowledge it as his own. The connection rests here upon an object and a disputed identification, precisely as recorded by the newspaper.
Sananès, an itinerant pedlar, was said to have been lured towards a dwelling atop Bab-Ali under the pretext of selling his fabrics. A man purportedly returned alone to guide him, and then, roughly a kilometre away, struck him about the head. Two passers-by ran to the rescue; the assailant took to his heels, leaving behind his cudgel and one shoe. Sananès initially thought he recognised a suspect, but the article dismisses this identification as mistaken in the light of other evidence. Statements attributed to Kheira and an indirect witness subsequently turned suspicion toward Bou Aza. Juan Parés, assaulted on June 8 after being asked for tobacco, managed to escape; he asserted he could recognise one of his attackers, but he had already quit the colony by the time the prisoners were taken into custody.
Djelloul’s arrest on July 30 provided the investigation with a firmer piece of material evidence. He was seized after offering resistance in the gourbi he occupied with Bou Aza. There, officers discovered a shotgun which a farmer named Alibert identified as his own, stolen a few weeks earlier from an outbuilding whose roofing planks had been prised apart. Djelloul stated that the weapon belonged to Bou Aza; the latter maintained it had been given to him by a servant of the caïd, who denied the assertion. The correspondent concludes on his own authority that the presence of the shotgun demonstrated the complicity of both men in the theft. This was an inference of the press, distinct from a verified fact recorded as such.
Two days following the arrest, the burnous of Kaddour ben Zellat was found in the brush. The old man had been struck on the head and robbed while returning from his garden; he identified Djelloul as his assailant. This identification, the Gazette asserts, lent weight to the recovered object. As for Mouffog, the final charge against him was reduced to an attempted theft of a donkey, committed alongside Bou Aza in the autumn of 1864. Two witnesses were said to have seen them leading the beast and had restored it to its master after their flight. The correspondent regarded the charges against Mouffog as of lesser gravity.
At the assizes, the preserved summary is concise and heavily biased. The correspondent claims that the six accused never lost their composure during their examination, though he reproduces none of their replies. Forty-four witnesses called by the prosecution were heard. The public prosecutor, Pouget, pressed for a conviction and demanded exemplary punishment, invoking the safety of the colonists. The defence subsequently addressed the court, but its arguments are not abridged; the dispatch does not permit the reader to weigh the testimonies or the points of contestation.
After three days, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against all six men, according to the Gazette. The newspaper records that Bou Aza ould el Abdelli was sentenced to death; Snoussi ben Fergoug, Brahim ben Moktar, and Mohamed ben Medjadji to hard labour for life; and Mouffog ould Daho bel Hadj to five years’ imprisonment. For the twenty-year sentence, the paper prints “Djelloul ben Moktar,” in contrast to “Djelloul ben Aouadja” in the opening list. Similarly, Mouffog appears as “Dabo” in the list, but as “Daho” in the verdict. In the absence of an independent judicial record, the true identity of the man sentenced to twenty years remains uncertain; these discrepancies have been preserved.
The close of the court report leaves behind a succession of unanswered thresholds: the rosary that was never found, the slipper identified by a craftsman but disowned by its putative owner, the shotgun whose provenance was bandied between two men, tales passed from mouth to mouth, and finally a jury whose deliberations remain unrecorded. The verdict is attested by the Gazette; the precise weight of the evidence and the identity attached to one of the sentences remain constrained by the source. Behind the correspondent’s declarations of “manifest guilt,” the reader is left with nothing more than a highly compressed trial report, penned from within a colonial order that candidly proclaims which interests it intends to defend.