Mad Moor

MOROCCO MAD MOOR

Hour after hour, French army planes circled Morocco's barren Atlas Mountains. Turbaned goumiers, the fierce Moroccan troops, scrambled through narrow ravines and over rocky ridges. Gendarmes followed police dogs straining for a scent over the mountain passes. In all, some 12,000 hunters were combing the hills for a rifle-toting tribesman who in one week had murdered seven people, wounded two others.

The Picnickers. The fugitive, dubbed by French newsmen "the Mad Moor," had begun his killing spree on Whitsunday (May 13), when Andre Souvignon, a young French official, picnic-bound in the family Renault, met him on a twisting mountain road near Ben el Ouidane. Without warning, the killer had stepped from behind a cactus bush, pumped shot after shot into the car, killed Souvignon and his mother, wounded another couple. On the same road, three miles farther on, police found the crumpled, blood-drenched body of a 26-year-old Parisienne named Helene Meunier, who had motorcycled into the hills to enjoy a picnic lunch. Her lunch, Still neatly wrapped, lay in a ravine below.

Fifty feet away from Helene, the body of a French businessman named Herve du Bourg was sprawled with a bullet hole between the shoulder blades.

Two days later, 25 miles from the scene of the Whitsunday murders, Georges Chantot, a crippled World War II veteran, was fishing by a laurel-bordered brook, with his wife, their three-months-old daughter, and a schoolteacher friend.

Suddenly, one of the two white-robed figures hunched over a fire on the other side of the brook whipped out a rifle and fired. Chantot clutched at his throat, held out his wallet and cried, "Take it--" The rifleman fired again. "Save yourselves--" cried Chantot to the women as he fell, but it was too late. A third shot caught the schoolteacher in the leg. As she writhed on the ground, the killer crossed the brook and shot her dead. Before he could turn his attention to Madame Chantot and the child, a passing truck scared him off.

Five Shots to Go. By last week, police thought they knew who the killer was. They recalled an incident that had occurred four days before Whitsunday in a small native village--a quarrel between a corporal in the native auxiliary troops and an ex-trooper named Amou N'Talit Tademalit, a Berber tribesman who, some said, was in love with the corporal's wife. Whatever the cause, the corporal had decided to show his contempt for Amou by treating him like a servant. Riding proudly up to his house that day, he had flung his reins at the Berber and ordered him to hold the horse while he dismounted. He had also handed Amou his rifle to hold (although the Berbers, a proud, sensitive people who had ruled the land long before the Arabs or the French got there, are not permitted to own rifles in Morocco). Amou calmly took the gun, drew a bead on the corporal and killed him. Then he fled to the hills with the gun and 21 cartridges.

By last week local police reckoned that Amou, if he was indeed the Mad Moor, had five shots left. They knew he would use them efficiently. "He is mad, yes," said one gendarme, "but he is cool. He has only one goal--to kill as many Europeans as possible before he dies."

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