The Wrong Man

Marrakesh · Hivernage · 2017 · Recent

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

On the evening of 2 November 2017, two men on a scooter pulled up outside Café La Crème in Hivernage, walked to one table on the terrace, and opened fire on it. The man they killed had sat down in that chair a few minutes earlier.

His name was Hamza Chaib. He was twenty-six, a seventh-year medical student, and the son of a senior judge. The chair belonged to the café’s owner, a Dutch-Moroccan figure in the organisation the Netherlands calls the Mocro Maffia, who had moved from the table shortly before and walked away unhurt. Two other people at the terrace were wounded, one of them seriously. The scooter was found later, burnt out.

Two Dutch nationals were arrested in Morocco and sentenced to death in Marrakesh in 2019. The sentences were upheld in 2023, quashed by the Court of Cassation in 2024 — which held that their cooperation and their account of who the real target was had not been properly weighed — and reaffirmed by the Casablanca Court of Appeal in January 2026. Morocco has not carried out an execution since 1993, so what the court has ordered is a sentence that will not be performed and cannot be transferred home.