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.

Casablanca, 1993. Gendarmes search a flat on boulevard Abdellah Ben Yassine and carry out one hundred and eighteen videotapes. The tenant is Mohamed Mustapha Tabet, a police commissioner who runs the general intelligence branch for two city districts, and the flat is wired with cameras.

Investigators identified five hundred and eighteen women from the tapes; the indictment would speak of as many as sixteen hundred. How did one officer operate at that scale for seven years? What was a stamp or a signature worth to a woman who needed one? And why did no one around him say it out loud?

In part one of Casablanca Confidential, from Blood & Mint Tea: True Crime from Morocco, we follow the seven years before the raid, and the ordinary silence that kept Morocco’s most protected predator safe.

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