Casablanca Confidential

Casablanca · 1986–1993 · Historical · Part 1 of 2

This two-part episode concerns the systematic rape of hundreds of women by a police officer, filmed by him, and ends in an execution.

On 2 February 1993, gendarmes searched a flat on boulevard Abdellah Ben Yassine in Casablanca and carried out one hundred and eighteen videotapes.

The tenant was Mohamed Mustapha Tabet, a police commissioner who ran the general intelligence branch for the Aïn Sebaâ and Hay Mohammadi districts. The flat was wired with cameras, and he had filmed what he did in it. Investigators identified five hundred and eighteen women from the tapes and the identity cards kept with them; the indictment would eventually speak of as many as sixteen hundred.

Part one is not the raid. It is the seven years before it: what a job like his actually consisted of, what a stamp or a signature or a piece of paperwork was worth to a woman who needed one, and how a man in that position could operate at that scale, in a city of three million people, and be protected the entire time — not by a conspiracy, but by the ordinary reluctance of everybody around him to be the person who said it out loud.