1952: a bomb in Staircase A

In the building's archive there is a press cutting. It tells of an evening in 1952 when, at 6.40 p.m., a bomb exploded in the stairwell of Staircase A, injuring the building's Moroccan caretaker.

We have found no other source that mentions this event. No book, no thesis, no digitised archive. This page therefore publishes a document, not a certainty: the cutting as it stands, what it says, and a list of what we do not know.

What the cutting says

The article opens with a reminder: the device in the building was not the first. The bomb that exploded at the municipal depot, it says, gave the signal for a series of attacks that continued on boulevard de Suez, at Aïn Chock and in a Quranic school.

Then comes the scene. It is 6.40 p.m.; the Marché central district hears the blast. In the building every window is broken. Tenants come out onto the landings and reassure themselves as best they can: "A gas bottle has gone off in a kitchen!" Someone then remembers the explosion that had occurred "a few weeks earlier in the refuse incinerator" — that one in the basements of the building itself.

Jamma, the caretaker

The injured man's name takes one word in the paper: Jamma, the building's Moroccan caretaker. He was stepping out of the lift on the ground floor. The text describes him limping towards the exit and collapsing before he reached the threshold, his thigh torn open by fragments of stone and glass.

A crowd rushes "towards the great eight-storey building, crowned by three distinctive towers". The injured man is pressed with questions. All he can repeat is: "I was coming out of the lift. It went off!"

The fire brigade arrives and an ambulance takes him to the Maurice Gaud hospital — the institution that would become, after its 1956 merger with the Jules Colombani hospital, the heart of today's Ibn Rochd teaching hospital.

The investigation

The paper names the officers sent to the scene: Tossan, divisional commissioner and head of the Sûreté; commissioner Bergerot, head of the mobile police; Capel, commander of the uniformed police; Campet, duty commissioner.

The findings are precise. The thick cement rail around the stairwell running down to the cellar is cracked and displaced at the level of the lift shaft. The wall is riddled with fragments, the concrete floor damaged; a piece of twisted metal is picked up. In the stairwell the damage reaches as high as the fifth floor.

The device

On a step, halfway between the ground floor and the basement, an officer finds what is left of the bomb. The description is of something crude and precisely of its time:

"It was possible to reconstruct a metal can some thirty centimetres high, of the kind used to transport perfume. The stopper was pierced by a Bickford fuse. The device must have been filled with explosive and small pebbles. It gave off a smell recalling that of apples."

A perfume can, a slow fuse, pebbles for shrapnel. Nothing industrial: an object made by hand and left in a staircase.

Against whom?

The question occupies the end of the article, and it stays open. The building's manager, Mr Maléa, is heard first. He says the caretaker had given him full satisfaction over the fifteen months he had employed him, and above all that from his first day he had "waged a vigorous struggle to drive out of the basements an idle underworld that was seeking to set up its headquarters there". He had recently helped the police arrest two suspects.

The journalist therefore considers that the bomb may have been aimed at the caretaker himself — then sets the idea aside for a common-sense reason: the device had been left in a place his rounds did not reliably take him.

One last element remains, and it is the most unsettling. A tenant tells investigators, unprompted, that his wife and mother-in-law had twice seen — around 3 p.m., then five minutes before the explosion — a man in a grey overall loitering at the foot of the stairs. Both women say they could recognise him. The article ends on a question that was never answered: is he the same man already reported at the previous attacks?

Casablanca in 1952

The context, by contrast, is solidly documented. 1952 was a year of extreme tension. On 30 March, for the fortieth anniversary of the protectorate, demonstrations broke out across the city. Nationalist trade unionism was gathering strength, Moroccans having no right to unions of their own.

The year ended in blood: on 7 and 8 December 1952 the Carrières Centrales riots — today's Hay Mohammadi — broke out after the assassination in Tunisia of the trade unionist Ferhat Hached. The official toll speaks of some forty Moroccans and seven Europeans killed; historians put it at between one hundred and three hundred dead. The Istiqlal, the PDI and the Moroccan Communist Party were dissolved.

One clarification is needed, and it complicates the story rather than simplifying it. The bombing campaigns we know well in Casablanca came after our cutting: the nationalist armed cells are dated to September 1953, the first attack on a train to 8 January 1953, the Marché central bomb to 24 December 1953. On the settler counter-terror side, the "Main Rouge" began planting bombs in Tunisia at the end of November 1952 and struck in Morocco only later.

In other words: this bomb predates both organised campaigns. We do not know who planted it, and we will not put forward a name.

What we do not know

This must be said plainly, because it is half the interest of the document.

• No corroboration. No secondary source and no accessible digitised database mentions this explosion, nor the incinerator blast that preceded it by a few weeks.
• None of the names could be found elsewhere: not Jamma, not the manager Maléa, not the officers Tossan, Bergerot, Capel and Campet.
• The series of attacks mentioned at the top — the municipal depot, boulevard de Suez, Aïn Chock, the Quranic school — is confirmed by nothing else.
• The perpetrator remains unknown, and the investigation, if it reached a conclusion, has left no trace online.

Where to look

Two precise leads, for anyone who would like to verify.

First the press of the period, digitised and consultable: La Vigie marocaine and Le Petit Marocain, the two great Casablanca dailies, are on Gallica for 1952. An explosion at 6.40 p.m. would have appeared in the following morning's edition.

Then the protectorate archives, held at the Diplomatic Archives Centre in Nantes: the Casablanca Sûreté police reports for the summer and autumn of 1952 should contain the names the paper cites.

If you recognise this cutting, if you know which paper it comes from, if a grandparent spoke to you of that evening — write to us. This page exists to be completed.

A note on the address

One detail of the cutting deserves attention: the paper places the explosion "in the Immeuble Assayag, at no. 18 avenue Poeymirau". Two pieces of information sit there. The street then bore the name of General Poeymirau — it is today's rue Hassan Seghir. And number 18 is indeed one of the building's two entrances, the other being number 14: that is where the address 1418 on today's official documents comes from. The visits page sets this out.

The vocabulary has shifted too. The paper writes "la montée A", the word Casablancais used in 1952. In the building itself it has always been l'Escalier A, and that is the form we keep here.

Finally, the journalist's phrase — "the great eight-storey building, crowned by three distinctive towers" — matches exactly what is known of the building: seven storeys of flats, an eighth service floor, then the penthouses. Already in 1952, the floors were counted as they are today.

Sources: press cutting held in the building's archive (the newspaper and exact date are not identified on the fragment; the archive places it in October 1952); for the context: work on the Carrières Centrales riots of 7-8 December 1952 and on Moroccan nationalist trade unionism; the record of the Maurice Gaud hospital, now the Ibn Rochd teaching hospital. The colourised photograph is a modern treatment of the black-and-white press print.