For eight years that he has been looking for his father everywhere, Hisham Terrak has habits “anchored” in him. Scrutinize the faces of the people he meets on the street, go out to meet the “little old people” who look like him, make it a point to check out all the leads, even the most eccentric ones. A permanent state of tension which ended this Tuesday, September 26, after a phone call from the judicial police. His father El Mekki Terrak, who disappeared at the age of 79 from his home in the Mordacs district of Champigny on July 17, 2015, died and was buried. “The irony of this whole story is that he had been dead for eight years,” learns this 45-year-old man.
He was 37 when his father, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, left home without a trace. Worried, the family notified the Champigny police station and quickly publicized his disappearance. Several leads then led his relatives to Paris to the Barbès district which he frequented, and to other districts of the capital, in vain. As early as the summer of 2015, witnesses indicated having encountered the retiree in Paris, looking disoriented, near Stalingrad (10th), near the Château d’Eau metro station, or even at Goutte-d’Or. With each report, Hisham Terrak moved. False lead after false lead.
“I always have this feeling that prevents me from living fully”
“Hello everyone, unfortunately the person found is not my father,” Hisham learned at the beginning of 2016 on the Facebook group “Search Mr El Mekki Terrak” still followed by 38,000 people. “I always have this feeling that prevents me from living fully, how to have fun, laugh, live while knowing that my father is outside, there somewhere,” he wrote again on July 16. In reality, El Mekki Terrak probably died a few weeks or even a few days after his disappearance, about ten kilometers from Champigny in a town in Seine-Saint-Denis. The circumstances of his death are not precisely known and probably never will be.
Following the disappearance of El Mekki Terrak, searches were carried out in the Barbès district of Paris. LP/Fanny Delporte
“It was discovered between a railway line and an industrial zone. A priori by demonstrators as part of a company strike,” he explains. At the time, they would have crossed a side road and, alerted by a suspicious smell, would have come across the remains of El Mekki whose body was already very damaged, as well as his clothes. “He probably fell, exhausted,” imagines Hisham. El Mekki had been suffering from memory problems for several years.
He would then have been buried under X, in the paupers’ section of the cemetery in the area where he was discovered. It is the fact that his DNA was taken at the time which explains today’s outcome. “From what I know it is a procedure which is authorized at the discretion of the mayor”, particularly when we find a deceased person on the public highway who has no papers on them, nothing to identify them. “It was done for him and that’s good for us,” reacts Hisham Terrak. The link was finally made because three years ago, police asked the family for items that might contain El Mekki’s DNA.
“There is now mourning to be done”
“I gave him a beret and his hearing aid,” Hisham recalls. It took three years for the genetic information to be cross-referenced. “There is no doubt it is him”, indicates his son, who remains waiting to know if he will be able to recover his father’s remains in order to “bury him with dignity” because the duration conservation of the deceased in this context is limited. “We are waiting for the administration to do its work to find out if we can exhume him and have him buried in the Parisian cemetery of Thiais near our mother where there is a vault,” he explains.
Hisham Terrak alongside his father, El Mekki. DR
“There is now mourning to be done,” Hisham slips, after eight years of frantic research which even led him to the National Assembly to discuss the difficulties of families whose loved ones have disappeared. In 2016, he gathered more than 11,000 signatures in a petition launched on the Internet to demand the return of the RIF system, research in the interest of families, abolished in 2013.
By chance, he received news of his efforts with the National Assembly on September 26, a few hours after learning that his father had died and had been buried. “It remains complicated,” assures Hisham. Just yesterday, driven by a friend in the car, I looked at the homeless people along the road. I must realize that I no longer have to look, that I no longer have to be in tension. Now I know, but I don’t know if I should be happy and relieved or if I should be sad and cry. »
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