Of All the Towns in the World: The Casablanca Dismemberer

There's an average corner in Casablanca of Boulevard Brahim Rudani in Madiv, where a narrow pedestrian street runs off between the shops. If you've seen it, you probably wouldn't remember it. The old maps call the little street Rue du Jura. At its beginning, on one side, there's a bar or restaurant called La Presse with a few tables out on the pavement.

On the opposite side, a man sells cigarettes one at a time from a kiosk. It is dawn. The second Tuesday of February 2003. The city is relatively empty. Tomorrow is Aidl Atha, the feast of the sacrifice, and anyone with a family in the countryside already left to visit them. Everyone who stayed is asleep.

Except that on the rooftops and the balconies and in the courtyards of the apartment blocks, there are sheep tied up, fed, but a week ago at a price the entire family argued over. Tomorrow morning, every one of them will be slaughtered and hung and skinned and carved into pieces by fathers and uncles in kitchens.

The knife grinders had a busy week. On this one morning a year, many homes in Casablanca become private butcher shops.

At half past six, a small red taxi stops at the corner. A young man gets out. He pays. He asks the driver to wait a moment, and he reaches up to the roof rack where there are two cardboard boxes tied with string. He lifts the first one down and sets it on the pavement, at the mouth of the little street, two or three meters from the tables of La Presse.

He lifts the second one down and holds it against his chest. He lets the taxi go. Then he walks off down the Rue de Jura, carrying one box and leaving the other exactly where it is.

Two people see him do it. A customer at one of the tables with the first black coffee of the day. And the cigarette seller setting up. They watch a man, heavily encumbered, carry one heavy box into the street and leave a second one behind. And they assume the same thing anyone would. It's too much to carry.

The man will be back for the second one. The customer drinks. The cigarette seller sits down on his tool to wait for the day to start. After all, it's the early morning in a busy city. It's Casablanca. Every pavement in Mariff is stacked with goods, the shops prepare to open.

Only five minutes pass. Then ten. Then twenty. And the man doesn't come back. At half past seven, another man walks past and stops. Because of the string. It's good string. Thick and knotted well. Exactly what you'd want tomorrow morning for hanging a sheep by its back legs. And the box is obviously rubbish.

Look where it was left. So he crouches and he works the knots loose, and he coils the string and puts it in his pockets. He's about to stand up and go, but he's curious. He lifts the lid just to see.

The cigarette seller is still watching. The man doesn't shout. He doesn't run. He stays where he is, looking into the box, but the color goes out of his face. Suddenly, he falls over at the sight of what he's discovered.

This is Blood and Minty, true crime from Morocco. I'm Zach.

And I'm Karima. Storytelling is Morocco's oldest art form. And we'll be looking at one case per episode, diving into the dark side of the tradition. This time we moved forward 100 years from Marrakesh to Casabloyka in 2003. A modern city with a modern police force. And for almost a year, bodies on its pavements that nobody could put a name to.

Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, a bar called Rick's. And the whole film turns on papers. It opens with murder. Two German couriers killed for the letters of transit they were carrying, the surest way out of the city at the time. The police flood the streets, rounding up suspects, checking everyone's papers.

One man's are out of date. He runs and they shoot him dead on the pavement. In that Casablanca, your papers decided whether you got out alive.

The film was shot on the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California, and nobody who made it ever set foot in the city. But sixty years later, in the real Casablanca, bodies were turning up on its pavements, and papers still decided everything. If the police could say who you were, if your family ever found out what happened to you.

And someone had gone through a great deal of trouble to make sure the dead had no papers at all. This is the story that actually happened on its streets. Welcome back to Blooded Mean Tea. And if you're joining us for the first time, welcome. You picked a good case.

Last episode we went to where Morocco's documented record of serial murder begins in 1906 when the record kept very little. This time we've come forward to a case where we have access to almost every case detail. There are police statements, autopsy findings, a national newspaper that followed the investigation day by day.

That, by the way, had never happened in Morocco before. There was even a television crew that was allowed to film inside the crime lab in this case. But before we start, a quick word about what's in the episode. This is a story about murder, dismemberment, and suicide. So listeners be advised that it may not be suitable for some audiences.

Look up into the twilight sky. Two towers are standing over the boulevard, 28 floors each, and every window is still lit at this late hour. It's the Casablanca Twin Center. It's barely four years old and comprised of the two tallest buildings in Casablanca. A hotel, offices, a shopping gallery at the base.

And down at street level, the neighborhood is still awake. Taxis are double parked outside the gallery. Couples are walking off dinner. Men at cafe tables sit under the street lights reading their newspapers. And there are more papers to read than there used to be, thanks to Morocco's growing free press.

Al Ahdat al-Maghribia and Astabah in Arabic. All of them knew in the past few years, and all of them hunting for readers. And each had discovered something that sells. Crime. Real crime. With names and photographs written up like fiction. Moroccan true crime stories being invented in real time in the newspapers of Casablanca.

And the people reading the stories are learning for the first time how police work is done.

At the same time, the police force is being given a facelift. Sunday night television is showcasing honest detectives who follow the rules. Starting in early 2001, the two national television channels began making detective films, cop movies set in Morocco, and they don't build sets, they shoot in real police stations.

They use real squad cars, real uniforms, real inspectors' offices. And for the morgue scenes, they use the real Casablanca morgue. Remember that one, because in a few months, the same police are going to let a very different camera crew into that morgue. And the police fiction everyone is used to is going to take a much more realistic turn.

Casablanca itself, in 2002, has a few million people within the city center, and far more once you count the sprawling suburbs. It's the country's port, its bank, its factory floor. Anything made, sold, or shipped within Morocco touches it. And it's the building's sight everywhere you look. New office towers, along the boulevards, new apartment blocks in Marif, cranes over the old French quarter.

And every one of those buildings needs a guardian. A man, usually from outside the city, who lives in a room on the ground floor or mezzanine. He washes the door, takes the deliveries, oversees maintenance, and sweeps the lobby. In a city of millions, countless guardians exist, and they blend in.

And speaking of the construction, every one of those building sites produces packaging. Cement sac, crates, cardboard. It goes out onto the pavement with everything else. Walk down Boulevard Rudani in 2002 and you're walking through a corridor of boxes. Eventually, you get familiarized and you don't even see a single one.

And here's where the real Casablanca starts to sound like the film. Everything depends on papers. In the early 2000s, the Moroccan government is also in the middle of a national campaign to make sure every citizen registers for an identity card. The Carte Nationale, the CIN. By the spring of 2003, the Interior Ministry will report 18.5 million cards issued.

To get one, you present your papers and a certificate saying where you live. But consider who gets left out. If you live in a shiny town, uh Bidonville, on the eastern edge of the city, there is no certificate that says you live there. Because officially nobody lives there. A large portion of Casablanca and its outskirts never applied for or needed that card.

And here's why that matters for a murder investigation. When the police find a body they can't recognize, they have exactly two ways to name it. Either someone reports a person missing and the description fits, or the fingerprints match a set the state already holds. And the state only has your fingerprints for two reasons.

Either you applied for the card or you were arrested. So no card, no arrest, nobody looking for you. You're essentially invisible. You can be found on a pavement in the biggest city in the country and stay unknown for months.

One final factor in this story. Morocco has committed itself loudly to the American War on Terror, and its police are focused on their job. In the winter, a Saudi Al-Qaeda cell was on trial in Casablanca itself. The detectives have directives to find more. The intelligence services are in the squares and the mosques.

So this is the Casablanca our story lives in.

In Marif on the Place Ibn Tufal, an abandoned villa sits next to a high school. And on one corner of the villa's wall, somebody left the lower half of a man. Just that from the waist down.

The enfe police come, look, and take it to the morgue. They learn the man is about twenty five. His feet are clean, which the police mentioned to a reporter, because it means he wasn't living on the streets. Somebody somewhere probably expected him back. Two newspapers run it. Al Ahtl Magribia gave it four lines on the front page.

Asaba gave it a few more the next day. Then silence. No arrest, no name, no follow-up. A half of a man went into a drawer at the Morgan May, and the city forgot. Hold on to him. Welcome back.

Then, Tuesday, the 13th of August, High Mohammedy, on the eastern edge of the city, where the Boulevard Grand Centure runs. It's the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the summer, in a city that's mostly gone to the beach. Layla Rahimi is at the sink washing up. She's seventeen. She's just passed her final year at the Human Al-Fatwaki Middle School, and she's decided what's next.

She's going to enroll at the vacational training center in the autumn. She has friends. Her family knows nearly all of them by sight. Suddenly there's a knock at the door. Layla dries her hands and goes to open it. Her sister behind her in the flat sees a girl standing there in a black jalaba. She sees her from the back, so she never sees her face.

Layla says something, and then she leaves the dishes and goes out with the girl, and the door shuts behind her.

Nobody in the house knows who the girl was. Nobody knows where they were going. It's the afternoon. It's normal. Teenagers go out and see friends. But night falls. Layla doesn't come home. Layla's parents start searching the neighborhood, knocking on the doors of everyone they know, but they get nowhere.

In the morning, with still no sign of Layla, they go to the police station Haimadi, report their daughter missing, and describe the girl in the black chalaba as best they can. That's word.

Ben Masik, Boulevard Abdul Kader Asahrawi, near a block of flats called the Residence Fadi. A street sweeper is working the curb and comes to a black plastic trash bag sitting on its own in a corner. He opens it to check for recyclables before taking it to the dumpsters. But after he reports what he found inside, the police will bring dogs, and the dogs will work the length of the boulevard.

They'll find four more, five plastic bags in total, containing a body that's been chopped into seventeen pieces. That afternoon, the police will call the Rahimi family and drive them to the morgue, where they'll ask them to look at the face.

A wire went out from the State News Agency MAPE quoting the security services. A wire went out from the State News Agency MAPE quoting the security services. The murder of Leila Rahimi, it said, was a crime passionel, a crime of passion. No suspects, no arrest, no new details. And that phrase proves interesting and gives an insight into what the police believed at the time.

It announces to the city that Leila knew her killer. It closes the case in the public's mind while leaving it entirely open in the file. And it does one more thing, which is the reason the police put it out. That August there were rumors all over Casablanca that one notary and another policeman had recently been killed by jihadists.

And people were starting to say the same thing about the girl in the bags.

Her father told a reporter she had no enemies, that she lived a normal life. The neighbor said the same and that she wouldn't have left the house without a reason. The autopsy said whoever had done this had done it with the precision of a butcher and might not have done it alone. Twenty eight days passed.

The police, by their own later account, had literally nothing. No lead, no informant, no witness beyond a sister who'd seen the back of a nondescript black jalaba.

Fast forward to Monday, September ninth, at ten in the morning, Rue Libourne in a neighborhood called La Girante in the middle of the city. Not a back alley, a street with heavy traffic, a different sweeper cleaning the street, but a similar, suspicious black bag, this time under a tree. He goes to toss it in his cart, but it weighs a lot.

So he looks and finds the lower half of a woman. This time the gendarme also brings dogs to help the police investigate. And an hour and a half later, a few streets away, by the Murdoch Gardens, the dogs stop at a second bag. A white bag this time, and it contains the upper half. Only the head is missing.

At the morgue, the pathologist does what she can with what she has. The hands are a grown woman's hands. The joints of the fingers say over thirty. There are no wounds on the body, no bruising, nothing that says she fought, which means she was probably strangled or had her throat cut, and that the rest was done afterward.

And then the two questions that should identify her and don't. Has anyone reported a woman missing? No. Not in the last weeks, not anyone who fits the age and description. And then do her fingerprints match anything the state has on file? No. She must have never applied for a card and she was never arrested.

So officially, she's still a no one.

Now a city gets frightened. Picture it from the inside. You're a twenty five-year-old woman in September 2002, and you've stopped at a cafe on your way to her house. On the table sits a copy of Astaba, and the whole front page is one story. The headline reads Series of Murders and Mutilations Terrify Young Women of Casablanca.

It has photographs, not of the victims, but of the bags. Inside there are five articles and a full page spread. Every one of them tells you the same facts.

The paper has interviewed women like you. They say they aren't going out after dark anymore, and when the reporter asks young women whether they think it might be a serial killer, they just push it away. That's a disease from the movies, they say. Those sicknesses exist in places like America, not here.

A security official quoted on the same page agrees with them. There's never been a crime committed in Morocco, he claims, with a purely psychological motive.

The police respond, and this is where the pattern of the next half year gets set. In September, an unnamed police official tells El Ahdat, No matter what it looks like, there is no way to link the crimes. The investigation has leads. Solving it is a matter of time. And they do something new. They put leading scientists in front of the press.

The medical examiner of Einstein, Farid Abushta, tells a reporter her process and findings when she's examined the woman from La Girante. And a director of the country's Institute of Forensic Science, a man called Said Wahia, gives a full page interview under a headline declaring Multiple Pead These Crimes.

A serial killer, he explains, chooses one type of victim over and over because one image obsesses him. Show me a group of victims who look alike, he says, and I'll tell you it's one man. But these victims do not look alike at all. So the official position in September is this. Three bodies, three killers, or more.

No connection, a matter of time. Then Monday, the second of december, two thousand two rolls around and things change.

A dumping ground near Soxte, a young woman, and she's been dead for weeks, cut up like the others, and she has a black plastic bag tied around her neck. The scientific police come out in their lap coats to collect and inspect. The coroner does the autopsy, and the result is the same as La Gironde. No report of anyone missing.

No prints on file, no name. And she, victim number four, went into the drawer beside the two already unidentified victims.

Then the meetings at the prefecture on Boulevard Zarktuni get longer. The theories get more elaborate, and at the start of January, the man in charge of policing Casablanca, the chief of police, Bushaib Rumel, does something no police chief in Morocco had done before. He gives an interview to the crime reporter at Al Hadad, published on the 4th of January 2003.

He says Casablanca is safer than most cities its size. He says the police across the city are working together and the pathologists are working with them. And he says the thing he's come to say the four murders have absolutely no connection to one another. All talk of serial murder is completely wrong.

He's the chief of police, and he's on record, and the city is meant to. Sleep a little better. Less than a month later, he was going to turn out to be half right. In the worst way there was to be half right.

Saturday, the twenty fifth of January 2003. It's just after dawn at the junkyard on the road out of the city to the southeast. The people who work here are called chiffonnier, rag pickers, and they're at work before the first light, turning the piles over for anything that can be sold for scrap. One of them finds a plastic bag and opens it.

He quickly calls the others over, and none of them know what to do.

It doesn't matter. Within minutes, there are gendarme jeeps coming down the track. This time, it's three bags. Eight pieces. Amen.

And this time, finally, they get a lucky break. The scientific police are able to take good fingerprints from the victim's body, and the fingerprints get sent to the identification service. The service has them on file because years earlier, this young man had come in to apply for his national card. His name is Ahmed Balliut, 35 years old, employed with an address with a family, identified in under a day.

The police talk to the latest victim's family and his friends, and within a week they have to rest. For nine years, Ahmed lived with a woman called Medika, a singer and dancer in a popular troupe at her place in Speta where they will find her. So she drugged this drink and strangled him with an electrical cord and cut his throat.

And then, with the help of two men she paid, she cut him into eight pieces and put him in bags and took him to the dump.

And when the police asked her why in pieces, why the bags, she confesses, because of the killer of Casablanca, the Casablanca dismemberer. That's how he does it. She thought if her boyfriend turned up cut into pieces in plastic bags, the police would add him to the list of anonymous victims of this new serial killer and never look for her.

So, on one hand, the first victory for the police, a body, a name, a killer, a confession, all in one week. And a confession that says exactly what the chief has been saying since January. Not a serial killer. A crime of passion, a woman, revenge. On the other hand, the reason the confession exists is that a woman in Sparta planned their murder around the assumption that there is a killer of Casablanca, that everybody knows how he works, and that the police are helpless in stopping him.

He's real enough to hide behind. Suddenly, it doesn't matter if it's one serial killer on the streets. This idea is planted in every head in the city, including potential murderers.

Malika was arrested, and so were the two men she'd paid. All three were sent to Ucacha, Casablanca's main prison, to wait for trial, and as far as the gendarmes were concerned, this case was closed. Some of the detectives weren't so sure. One of those two men had just helped cut a body into pieces and leave it in bags.

So they had him brought out of the prison, back to the prefecture on Boulevard Zirktuni, and they put the other three bodies to him. He denied all of it, and after a while they believed him. He wasn't the serial killer. The pressure from this copycat murderer went all the way to the top. The head of the Sierte Nacional, the Moroccan National Police, Hafid Ben Hashem, came down from Rabat and set up his quarters in Casablanca.

He held meetings, he visited the places the bags were found, and he expanded the investigation significantly. A week later, the taxi we started with stopped on Rudani.

So, back to the corner, and the man who collapsed to the ground after opening the lid. The cigarette seller and the customer from La Presse run to him to pick him up. They get as far as the box and stop. Inside it there's a plastic bag, and inside the bag the lower half of a body. Somebody calls the one nine.

The crime scene team, the judicial police, and the lap people all arrive. The two witnesses tell them what they saw. A young man, a small taxi, two boxes. One carried off down the pedestrian street was the rest of Maerif. And while they're still taking that down, the local shopkeeper comes running up the boulevard from the Rue Ibnir, two streets over.

He can barely get it out. Despied Despied, he says, feet. He wants them to come. Now.

So half the detectives follow the man at a run, down the length of the Rue de Jure, through a second alley to his street, where there's a box exactly like the first one, on the pavement, next to a pile of household rubbish. Voila, there it is, the upper half. And inside the box with the body, there's something else.

Two pages torn from a newspaper, folded around an envelope. In the envelope, a letter, handwritten in Arabic, on a sheet torn from a school exercise book. The head of the criminal brigade read it standing on the pavement, and here it is.

For more than a year, I have been in a relationship with this man. He is the one who took my virginity. He promised me he would marry me as soon as we could. But when I fell pregnant, he decided to abandon me. So I decided to take my revenge by killing him. How will my family accept my belly, deformed, growing?

SC MARIF.

The pathologist's report on the man in the boxes states that he was between twenty eight and thirty. His genitals had been removed. All ten of his fingertips had been cut off, and his face had been destroyed. The lower jaw was gone, as well as the nose. Everything that could tell you who this man was had been taken away.

The fingerprints, the face, the mouth. And in their place somebody had placed a story. A very complete, potentially identifiable story with a motive and a pregnancy and initials and a neighborhood. The note claimed a woman did it out of revenge.

The city read it literally. The next morning's front page in El Ahdet called it a new challenge to the police. The Socialist Party's paper ran a collar photograph of the corner and called the box as a message to the chief of national police who had toured the city the week before. Two boxes a few minutes' walk from a police station on the eve of the biggest holiday of the year.

The police continued repeating their stance. Ferri Dabushta gave another interview stating that the killer was not mentally ill. The cut in was to hide the crime. The motive was revenge. The letter the police said was fake. A decoy. And they planned to examine it with every forensic resource they had.

The next morning was eight. All over Casablanca, on the rooftops and the balconies and in the courtyards, the sheeps that had waited all week were slaughtered and hung and carved up for the holiday feast, the way they are every year. And then the holiday ended, and the city went back to work, and the fear came back with it.

The police had a body with no face, no fingertips, and no name. They had a letter they said was fake, and they had two blood soaked cardboard boxes. Days would continue to go by with nothing.

What actually eventually broke the case had nothing to do with the letter, and is the least cinematic detail in the entire tragic series of the murders. It's the cardboard boxes. Somebody in the police department had looked at them properly, not at what was in them, at the actual boxes. They were the packaging for a product, and on the outside, there was a manufacturer's name.

They were based in Spain and made letter boxes, the metal kind that get fitted in the lobbies of new apartment and office buildings. The detective kept going from there. Who in Morocco imports these things? Construction companies, developers. He got a list of those companies, and his brigade started calling.

Every company said the same thing. We don't keep the packaging, we don't keep the cardboard, it gets thrown out or sold or taken. Except one. One developer who just finished a nine story office block near the Court of Appeal, a building called Espacial Menar. Yes, he said, we do keep the boxes, our building guardian probably has all of them.

The vans leave Sarponi, cross the Boulevard de la Resistance, and pull up on the side street of Boulevard Mohammedsenc, a hundred meters from the Court of Appeal. A new building, nine floors and a basement, forty offices, most of them still empty. The paint's barely dry. The detectives ask for the guardian, and the young man comes out of the building.

He's calm. In the reporter's words, he's far from attracting the slightest suspicion. Yes, he says. His boss gives him the boxes the letter boxes come in. Nope, he doesn't have them anymore. He gave them to Abdelaziz, the carpenter who's doing the woodwork in the building. Where is Abdlaziz? He doesn't know.

Tomorrow he'll be back, maybe. Or the day after. He's still got work to do.

Abdulaziz who? Just Abdelaziz. He doesn't know his last name. Where does he live? He doesn't know that either. The police took the guardian in, questioned him, and then let him go. They told him to stay available, and they went looking for a carpenter named Abdelaziz, who'd worked at Espas Elmanar. There were thousands of men in Casablanca with the name, and none of them had ever worked there before.

The developer asked directly was categorical. There was never a carpenter he employed by that name.

That brings us to Friday, the 28th of February. The police come back to the building to ask the guardian why he'd made up a carpenter. Only the guardian wasn't there. Nobody saw him go. The developer who hired him has no idea. His wages were still owed and he hadn't come for them. There's already a new guardian, sweeping the same lobby.

The police put out a national search notice and placed the building under watch in case he came back for his money.

While the police are still there, the new guardian comes across the lobby with a small plastic bag. He says, I found some things that belong to the old guardian. You may want to look at these. The commissaire tips it out. Personal papers, an identity card, and a small notebook, a school exercise book, the kind with a stiff cover with names written in it.

Workers on the site. He leaves through it, then stops on the first page and holds it up to the light. It's blank, but somebody had written on the sheet above it before they tore it out, and they'd pressed hard with the pen.

The officer can read it if he tells it in the light. He can make out familiar details. Revenge. The letter from the second box, pressed into the page below, in the guardian's own notebook, in the guardian's own hand. They have their man.

They had his legal name from the card, Mohammed Zuita, a date of birth, 1968, which made him 34 years old at the time, and a place. A Duar called Ait Imur, a village outside Marrakesh. The brigade drives there and finds his parents, his brothers and his sisters. Nobody has seen him, nobody has heard from him.

His father tells the police one detail about his son that he has epilepsy. The father also mentions one other thing, almost in passing. There'd been a cousin who'd been living with Mohammed in Casablanca. He'd left for Europe about a year ago. Allegedly, he'd planned to make the crossing illegally.

Back in Casablanca, the police go to the streets. They knock on doors. Neighbors, former addresses, the few people who'd been his friends. And the picture comes back that's mostly absence. Zwita was a man who kept to himself, who preferred, the reporter wrote, to be far from other people, who sometimes had women stay in his room in the building, but they were always women who worked the boulevard.

The police have one photograph of him. Only one. So at night, they take it to Boulevard Mohammed Sank and they start showing it.

The police produce more pictures. Photographs from the morgue, not of a face, because the body from La Gironde has no face, but of hands.

Picture what they're asking. It's the middle of the night on a boulevard, and the detective is holding out a photograph of a dead woman's hands to her friends. They look. The nails on the left hand are long. The nails on the right are cut short. That's her. The women all confirm. That's Zadia. That's how she always got them done.

And they burst into tears. Standing there on the boulevard, the women cry for the murder and mutilation of their friend, who has been resting in a morgue drawer since September. Unknown.

On Sunday, the second of March, at half past ten in the morning, a search warrant is issued for Espace Almanar. Vans Parker on the block, and enough officers get out to take the building floor by floor. Two or three to a floor, forty offices, nearly all of them still empty, doors that have never yet been locked once.

First floor, they find nothing. The second, nothing. They continue to go up. Fourth, fifth, sixth. All empty rooms with plastic still on the fittings. Seventh floor, eighth floor, nothing. Then they get to the ninth, the last floor, and the fortieth office. Still, they find nothing. Forty rooms, and they came up with a small zero, as the reporter puts it.

They stand in the last empty office and look at each other. A whole morning, a whole building for nothing. Where to now? Swita had no other address. But then, when officer has an idea he doesn't say out loud, he walks out on his own along the corridor to the toilet at the end of the top floor. He tries the door, it's locked.

From the inside. Every other toilet on every other floor of this building was open. He knocks. Nothing. Then he goes back and gets the others.

Together they break down the door. Inside, a man is lying on the floor on his back. He's wearing a yellow polo shirt, blue jeans, and canvas shoes. There's a towel laying over his face, and beside him, two bottles of poison half empty. Insecticide and drain cleaner. He also had an apple with two bites taken out of it.

In his pockets there's one hundred dirhams, a little hashish, his keys, and his wallet, along with a letter. A will of sorts. It asks that his belongings, the things in his room downstairs, be given back to his family. That's all it said. Nothing about murder, guilt, or remorse of any sort. The police hold the identity card photo next to the towel and they lift it.

That night, at the top of the evening news on Desem, in Arabic and then in French, the whole country watches a camera walk down a corridor on the top floor of a new office building into a toilet and stop on a man lying on his back with an orange towel over his face and two bottles beside him. Investigators, the newsreader says, have not ruled out that he was behind additional murders.

For the first time in the history of Moroccan television, the police have let a camera into the room before the body was moved. Nearly a year of repeating There is no connection ended on one evening Balton.

And there was still the basement. Down there was a storeroom with a toilet. In the toilet were the burned remains of a cotton sweater, along with an axe, a knife, and one last black plastic bag. Inside that black plastic bag contained one lower jaw, a nose, fingertips, the remains of a face, and the police said the remains of a second one.

The first face was the man from the boxes. In the weeks that followed, the lab tied the guardian to him from every direction. A strand of Mohammed Zwita's hair among the remains, the dead man's blood on a carton in the storeroom, bloody fingerprints on one of the boxes that matched the guardian's own.

What the lab couldn't provide was a name. So Said Wahlia and his team spent forty eight hours without stopping, rebuilding the man's face. First on the skull, with what they'd recovered from the basement, then as a color image on a computer. On march fifteenth, the newspapers printed the face of a man nobody had been able to identify for five weeks, and the mother and a sister recognized him.

A building card, like Swita, from the same village as Swita. We've looked for his name in every account of this case we could find, but he was identified by his family, who mourned him privately.

The second face was a woman's, and the lab matched it to the body from La Gironde. The woman on Boulevard Mohammed V had already told the police who she was, and now they could prove it. Through those women, the police found Sadia's sister, who cleaned houses for families across the city. The sister gave them her real name, Saida Nadirri.

Lam Zabia was the name she worked under. She was 41 and she had a child who was being looked after by an institution for women in difficulty. She used to go with Mohammed Zuita to Espes al Menar until September, when she stopped. Her brother said the relationship was a bad one, and that Zuita hit her.

Anyone who asked Mohammed where she'd gone got an answer. She'd left Casablanca, she'd moved down to Agadir. The women from La Gironde and the man from the boxes, Lualia told the press, had one thing in common the motive revenge.

That left one lead, and it ran all the way back to the beginnings of this story. Remember what Zuita's father told the police in Ainimur, almost in passing. A cousin who'd been living with his son in Casablanca had left for Europe about a year ago. Everyone in the family had heard it from the same person, Mohammed.

The cousin had been living in the guardian's room at Espaslmanar. Then he had vanished in the spring of 2002. And in the last week of May, the lower half of a man, about twenty five, was left on a corner of the place Ibn Tofael. When the police checked, that was the same week the guardian of Espaslmanar had disappeared from his post for seven days.

The cousin's brother was taken to the morgue and shown what had been in the drawer since May. He knew him. He said he'd know those legs and feet among a million. His mother identified a mark on the leg. The clothes the police had uncovered in the guardian's room were the missing man's, and the jacket Mohammed Zuita was wearing on the floor of the ninth floor toilet, the jacket he'd chosen to die in, was his cousin's.

Within days, the laboratory reported that the DNA confirmed it. The upper half of his body was never found, and like the other man from Zuita's village, no name was ever publicly printed.

Mohammed Zuita was never tried. So this is what the police concluded. Three victims, Turtle, they said. His cousin in May, the woman he was sleeping with in September, and the man from his village in February. Each of them, someone he knew as well as it's possible to know a person, each one with pieces missing.

A torso, then head, a face, and then ten fingertips. And for each of them, when someone asked a fabricated toy he had built, moved into Europe, started a new life in Agadir, murdered by a pregnant girlfriend from Arif. Leila Rahimi and the woman from Heheseni were never connected to him or to anyone.

Their cases are still open. Their files sit where they were in December 2002. Six bodies in total, three of his victims undoubtedly were. From confessed copycat killer. And two stories we'll never know.

Let's go back to where the story started. In 2002, Moroccan newspapers were just discovering that true crime sells, and the state was putting a new face on its police on Sunday night television in cop films shot in real police stations and the real Casablanca morgue. For six months, the paper had been trying to tell a serial killer story, and the police kept telling them there wasn't one.

The morning after the evening news, there was.

They filmed the lab in Rabat and the vials with his name on the labels. They filmed the technician holding the letter from the box next to the notebook from the lobby, tilting the page to show the pressure marks. They filmed the skull with the rebuilt face on it. And to end the broadcast, they filmed the detectives in the main police station, sitting together around the television, waiting for the evening news.

The news comes on. The story is theirs. And they clap.

In April, the Interior Minister, Mustafa Sahel, stood up in Parliament to answer for the winter. There was no organized crime in Morocco, he told the deputies. The crime rate wasn't really serious. It was well below what the newspapers reported. Plus, Casablanca would get 700 new police officers. And the key to all of it, he said, was identification.

The great battle was putting a national identity card in every citizen's hand.

It's been more than two decades. Casablanca is a massive building sites again. And the city watches itself now in ways it couldn't in 2003. Hundreds of police cameras on the main boulevards feed the wall of screens at police headquarters. Since 2020, the national identity card has carried the chip you can read with the phone.

Last year, the National Police reportedly solved 95% of the cases they recorded. Put a young man on the corner of Rudeny today, lifting two boxes off the roof of a taxi at half past six in the morning, and there's a fair chance a camera sees him do it.

But look at what Mohammed Zuita actually hid. It was never the bodies. He left those in public on some of the busiest streets in the city, a few minutes' walk from a police station. What he took away was everything that said who they were. A head, a face, their fingertips. A camera can follow a man down a street, but it can't tell you who's in the box he's carrying.

That still has to come from where it came from in 2003. Someone who knew the person and someone who noticed they were gone.

Every murder asks two questions. Who did this and who was it done to? Almost every crime story is about the first one. In the film, the chief of police rounds up the usual suspects, and nobody asks about the second question at all. A generation later, and half the dead in this story are still waiting on an answer to it.

The film Casablanca opens with two murders. Two couriers killed for the papers they were carrying. They're never named. By the next scene, nobody in Casablanca is thinking about them. The whole story is about the papers. We'd like to do this the other way around.

Leila Rahimi, 17. Sayyidien Naderi, 41. Ahmed Bilyud, 25.

Two more were named by their own families but never released to the public. A young man of about twenty-five, a cousin, and a man of about thirty from a village outside Marrakesh.

And finally, a young woman found by Sok Saeda in He Haseni in December 2002. No identity card. No fingerprints on file. Nobody looking for her. She's the only one in this story who ended up like those two couriers. Killed and never named. She was somebody. No one ever found out who.

Thank you for listening to Blood and Minty. We've written and produced this entire project ourselves, and we're so excited to have your support. You can follow us wherever you're listening, and episode three will be waiting for you soon. And if you have a few seconds, please leave us a rating and review.

For a new show, that's how people find us.

Next time, we're going back to Marrakesh, but fast forwarding to 2017. By the police's account, every one of Mohammed Sweda's victims was someone he knew. A cousin? A woman he was seeing, a man from his own village. Next time, the killers have never met the man they'll kill. In fact, it's their job. They're Dutch hitman, believed to have been hired by the so-called Moroccan mafia, by a man who will soon become one of the most wanted drug lords in the world.

On weeknights in November, they ride up on a motorcycle in masks to a cafe terrace in the Posh Ivernage neighborhood and open fire. Only what happens next is not what they planned.

You can also find us on social media at BloodMint Tea and wear bloodandmintea.com. If you want to support the show, you can order merch from our website and you can always support us on Patreon, where you can access bonus episodes and listen to episodes before anyone else does, all ad free.

In Adrafir Alumliki's 2010 series on the case, on the Bahraini Daily Al-Basad, which quoted the Casablanca police at the time, on Jonathan Smallin's book, Barocan Noir, which traces the coverage day by day. On Nina Kozlovsky's account for Jeune Afrique, and on telquel and l'économiste.

Until next time, thanks for joining us for Blood and Mint Tea. This is True Crime from Morocco.

Of All the Towns in the World: The Casablanca Dismemberer

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