Casablanca Confidential

Casablanca · 1986–1993 · Historical · Part 2 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.

A tape left the country. In the summer of 1992 a copy reached Milan, and a Moroccan man watching it recognised his own sister.

What that recognition set off is the second half of this story: a complaint that could not be buried in a police station because it did not start in one, a route that ran through the Italian embassy and up to the prime minister and the king, and then a trial that Morocco watched. It opened on 18 February 1993 before the criminal chamber of the Casablanca Court of Appeal. Tabet was sentenced to death on 15 March, the Supreme Court upheld it on 5 August, and he was shot at dawn on 9 August 1993 at Kenitra central prison.

Nobody has been executed in Morocco since. Part two ends on what the case left behind — the women who were named in a courtroom and then had to go home, the officers around him who were and were not charged, and a country that resolved the largest sexual-violence case in its history by killing one man very quickly and closing the file.