Season one · Episode 2

Of All the Towns in the World

The Casablanca Dismemberer. Casablanca, 2002–2003.

Casablanca · 2002–2003 · Recent

This episode describes dismemberment, mutilation of bodies, and a suicide. Listener discretion advised.

Casablanca, 2002. All winter, the city keeps finding pieces of people, packed in cardboard boxes or left in the street, the fingertips cut away so no one can say who they were. The trail eventually leads through a single cardboard supplier to the quiet caretaker of an apartment block near the Court of Appeal.

He never stood trial. Before the police could arrest him, he turned up dead in an empty ninth-floor flat in the building he looked after, and nothing was ever proved. How did detectives get from a box to a man? Why does the number of victims keep changing? And did he do it at all?

In episode two of Blood & Mint Tea: True Crime from Morocco, we follow the Casablanca Dismemberer from a school notebook holding the ghost of a letter to a case that closed without an answer.

Follow Blood & Mint Tea wherever you listen so you never miss a case.

Sources

Everything we used for this episode, in roughly the order it appears. Where a source is in French or Arabic, we’ve noted it.

Newspaper · French“Zouita : Le découpeur de cadavres.” Aujourd’hui le Maroc, 7 March 2003. Read it.
Newspaper · French“Le mystère Zouita s’épaissit.” Aujourd’hui le Maroc, 10 March 2003. Read it.
Newspaper · French“Le génie macabre de Zouita.” Aujourd’hui le Maroc, 12 March 2003. Read it.
Article · Arabic“The details of the suicide of the Casablanca killer who terrorised the residents of Maârif” (تفاصيل انتحار سفاح البيضاء الذي روع ساكنة حي المعاريف). Akhbarona, 12 February 2011. Read it.
Article · ArabicS. Doukalli, “Zouita, the killer of Maârif” (زويتة.. سفاح حي المعاريف). Morocco Times, April 2021. Read it.
Article · Arabic“Killers facing exceptional crimes (7): Zouita, a silent killer uncovered by Spanish mailboxes” (سفاحون في مواجهة جرائم استثنائية (7): زويتة قاتل صامت اكتشفته صناديق بريد إسبانية). Al Ittihad Al Ichtiraki. Read it.
Newspaper · FrenchAbderrafii Aloumliki, “Saïd Zouita : le meurtrier fou qui s’est donné la mort.” Serialized in Aujourd’hui le Maroc, August 2010. Parts 4, 7, 8, 10 and 11.
Article · FrenchLeïla Driss, “10 tueurs en série qui ont marqué l’histoire du Maroc.” Le360, 3 April 2018. Read it.
Article · FrenchNina Kozlowski, “Mohamed Zouita, le concierge dépeceur de Casablanca.” Jeune Afrique, 23 June 2026. Part of the series Moroccan Psycho. Read it.
BookJonathan Smolin, Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2013.