The Wrong Man

Marrakesh · Hivernage · 2017 · Recent

This episode describes a shooting and organised-crime violence. Listener discretion advised.

Marrakesh, 2017. On a November evening in Hivernage, two men on a scooter pull up outside Café La Crème, walk to one table on the terrace, and open fire. The man they kill, Hamza Chaib, is a twenty-six-year-old medical student and the son of a senior judge. He sat down in that chair a few minutes earlier.

The chair belonged to the café’s owner, a Dutch-Moroccan figure in the organisation the Netherlands calls the Mocro Maffia, who had just walked away. Two Dutch gunmen were sentenced to death in Marrakesh, and the courts have quashed and reaffirmed that sentence since. Who were the bullets meant for? What does a death sentence mean in a country that has not carried one out since 1993? And what is left for the family of the wrong man?

In episode three of Blood & Mint Tea: True Crime from Morocco, we follow a single café shooting from a terrace in Hivernage through eight years of Moroccan courts.

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