Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi kept a cobbler's shop in Marrakesh, and by the account given at the time was an elderly and respected man in the quarter.
In April 1906 the bodies of women were found buried beneath the floor of his shop and in the adjoining property. The accusation was that he had drugged women who came to him, with the help of an accomplice, an old woman who brought them, killed them and taken their jewellery, and that the practice had gone on for some years. Thirty-six was the figure given.
The record of this case is entirely colonial and journalistic. Morocco in 1906 was in the last years before the French protectorate, and the case was reported through European correspondents and consular officials, whose accounts are the only ones that survive in the languages the story has been retold in. What the Moroccan proceedings actually established is not recoverable from them.
He was sentenced to be crucified, that is, immured alive in a wall in a public square, and the sentence began to be carried out at the Bab Doukkala. Foreign residents and consuls objected, and the punishment was commuted; accounts differ as to whether he was left in the wall for two days before being strangled or was executed otherwise. He died in early May 1906. The manner of it, rather than anything about the killings, is why the case is remembered.