Saleh Hachad

Salah Hachad (; 1938 – 13 September 2025) was a Moroccan fighter pilot and squadron leader in the Royal Moroccan Air Force. One of the country’s earliest jet aviators, he became embroiled—willingly or otherwise—in the 1972 Moroccan coup attempt, was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment and spent eighteen of them in the secret Tazmamart desert jail. Freed in 1991, he later recounted his experiences in a widely viewed 2009 televised interview series.

Early life and education Hachad was born in 1938 in the village of Oulad Ayyach near Beni Mellal. He entered the Royal Military Academy in Marrakesh in February 1957 and completed fighter-pilot training in France in 1959.

Hachad and other surviving air-force officers were arrested, tried by court-martial and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Jeremy Harding likewise notes that “Salah Hachad … began receiving medicines: his wife, Aïda, a pharmacist, had bribed the guards.”

Release, later life and death Hachad was freed in September 1991 amid a broader political thaw and lived quietly until 2009, when he gave an eleven-episode interview on the Al Jazeera programme Shāhid ʿalā al-ʿAṣr (“Witness to History”), bringing his story to a wide Arabic-speaking audience.

Legacy Hachad’s testimony is cited in scholarly work on the “Years of Lead” and on prison memory in Morocco.