In the spring of 1906, young women were going missing in Marrakesh, Morocco. The family of one of them traced her to the shop of Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, an older man who mended shoes and also earned money as a public writer, setting down letters for people who could not write their own. An older woman said to have worked with him named him, and he was arrested and confessed. According to a cable sent from Tangier and printed in an American newspaper that June, he was found guilty of the deaths of 36 young women and condemned to crucifixion. Foreign officials in Morocco objected to that sentence. It was replaced by weeks of public flogging in the city's market and then, on June 11, 1906, by a sentence of being walled up alive. He was dead within about two days.
The story reached the outside world through that 1906 cable, and modern Moroccan journalism has retold it from the same report. The women's names have not survived in those accounts, and the accounts differ on several details.
Morocco in 1906 was still an independent sultanate, ruled since 1894 by Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz, as the Moroccan news site Yabiladi notes in its 2020 history of the case. It was also a country under heavy outside pressure. That year an international conference met at Algeciras, in Spain, to decide Morocco's future; the novelist Saeida Rouass, who researched the Mesfewi case for years, described it to Yabiladi as the moment "when Europe decided what it wanted to do with Morocco." Six years later, in 1912, Morocco became a French protectorate, according to the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian.
Foreign governments kept representatives in Morocco; the United States, for one, had raised its consulate at Tangier to a legation in March 1905, the Office of the Historian records. The Mesfewi story reached the outside world by cable from Tangier.
Marrakesh itself was under strain. Rouass told Yabiladi that the city in those years faced locusts in the fields, tribal revolts against the sultan and fear of famine. A 2024 survey of Moroccan criminal history in the Arabic-language outlet Arabic Post describes the same troubles, and says that the city's authorities were already stretched by a run of crimes, including disappearances of women and attempted killings, when the case broke.
The sources say little about Mesfewi himself. Yabiladi's English edition describes him as an old man who lived in the city and worked as a cobbler and a public writer. Its French edition calls him a cobbler and "écrivain public," a public letter-writer. Arabic Post calls him a simple shoemaker.
His birth date, his age in 1906, his family and his life before the case are not recorded in the published accounts. The cable printed in 1906 gave his age only indirectly: Yabiladi's French account, drawing on it, says the number of lashes in his later punishment was reduced because of his age.
By April 1906, residents of Marrakesh had noticed that a number of young women had disappeared, Yabiladi reports. Arabic Post describes several teenage girls going missing in 1906 and says the disappearances spread fear through the city. It says the pasha, the governor of Marrakesh, could not solve them, and that the city was put on alert. Arabic Post names the pasha as Ayyash ibn Dawud; the name is not confirmed elsewhere.
The families searched on their own. The cable printed in June 1906, as Yabiladi relays it, says the parents of one young woman traced her to the cobbler's shop. Yabiladi's French account adds that one family's lead was an older woman, said to be in her seventies, who had been the last person seen with their daughter.
The older woman is named in the 1906 account as Annah. Both Yabiladi articles describe her as about 70 and as Mesfewi's accomplice; Yabiladi's French edition says the 1906 cable used that word for her. One of the families seized her and treated her harshly until she talked, the reports say, and she did not survive it. Yabiladi's French account cites the Moroccan publication Al Ayam, in a 2014 article, for the statement that the family abducted her.
Before she died, by these accounts, she told them what happened to the girls who came to the shop. They came, she said, to dictate letters, and they were killed there. She named Mesfewi.
Annah was never tried. The accounts do not say whether the family that held her faced any consequence, and none gives her full name, her age with any precision or how she came to know Mesfewi.
Mesfewi was then arrested. Yabiladi's French account says he too was put under harsh pressure and confessed. Arabic Post says he confessed to carrying out the killings with an accomplice and that his motive was robbery.
The authorities searched his property. By the 1906 account as Yabiladi gives it, the remains of 36 young women were recovered in Marrakesh that spring. The women's money and belongings had been taken. Yabiladi's French edition says the investigation showed that his motive was money.
The sources do not set out how many women died in each year or over what span of time the killings took place.
The 36 women are the center of this case, and they are the people the record has lost. Not one of them is named in the published accounts, and nothing is recorded of their ages, families or neighborhoods. The cable called them girls and young women. Arabic Post calls them women and young girls, and says the missing in 1906 included teenage girls.
Saeida Rouass, who spent years on the case, said she looked for them and could not find them. Writing for the Crime Readers' Association, she said that she found nothing about the women except the total number he killed. When she turned the case into a novel, she told Yabiladi, she made a point of writing them as people: "It was important to me they too were characters, and not just nameless victims or numbers."
What the reports do say is how they came to the shop: as customers, to have letters written.
Within days of the case coming to light, Mesfewi was condemned. The 1906 cable, as Yabiladi relays it, said that he had been found guilty of the murder of 36 young women and that, by an old Moorish custom, he had been sentenced to be crucified. Yabiladi's English account says crucifixion was then a recognized punishment in Morocco. The reports do not describe a trial: who heard the case, what evidence was put, or whether Mesfewi had any defense. The final order, the cable said, carried the sultan's own signature.
The crucifixion was set for May 2, 1906, according to Yabiladi's French account. It did not take place. Foreign officials resident in Morocco objected, calling crucifixion cruel and inhumane, and intervened with the sultan to have it canceled. The date was put back, and the authorities announced that he would be beheaded instead.
The reports do not name the diplomats who objected or the governments they represented.
The beheading was not carried out either. According to the cable, as Yabiladi relays it, Mesfewi was held in the Marrakesh prison until outside attention had faded. Then, from May 15, 1906, he was taken each day to the city's market and publicly flogged.
The final sentence was that he be walled up alive in the market. It was carried out on Monday, June 11, 1906, a market day, before a crowd that Yabiladi, relaying the cable, puts in the thousands. Yabiladi's French account says such a punishment had not been carried out in Marrakesh for many years. He died about two days later; Arabic Post gives his date of death as June 13, 1906.
The case is known outside Morocco because of a cable from Tangier. Both Yabiladi articles identify their main source as The Times and Democrat, a newspaper in South Carolina, which printed the Tangier cablegram on June 28, 1906. Yabiladi's French account describes the cable as having come from the American consulate at Tangier; its English account calls it simply a cablegram from Tangier.
The novelist Saeida Rouass found that the case was reported widely at the time. She first read of it in an old newspaper while working for an environmental charity in Oman, she told Yabiladi in 2020, and at first she doubted it. At the British Library in London she then found many other newspapers reporting the murders in Morocco in 1906. She also looked for material at the American Legation in Tangier, she wrote for the Crime Readers' Association, and she spent six months in Marrakech gathering records on the killings, on Mesfewi's background and on the city's history.
In Morocco the case was written about again in the 2010s and 2020s. Yabiladi's French account cites a 2014 article in Al Ayam. Yabiladi published its own histories of the case in English and French in June 2020. Arabic Post included Mesfewi in a May 2024 survey of the best-known killers in Moroccan history. Rouass wrote that the case has not passed into Moroccan legend.
The reports agree on the outline: an older cobbler and public writer in Marrakesh; an older woman named as his accomplice who died after being seized by a victim's family; 36 young women; a sentence of crucifixion that foreign officials opposed; public flogging; and death by being walled up alive in June 1906. They differ on several details.
How the women were killed. The accounts differ on the cause of death, and none gives it for any named woman.
How he died. Yabiladi, relaying the 1906 cable, says he was walled up alive and died after about two days. Arabic Post gives a different form of execution. The two accounts cannot both be right; the 1906 cable, the closest source to the event that any of these accounts uses, supports the first.
The accomplice. The 1906 cable, by Yabiladi's account, names the older woman Annah. Arabic Post mentions an accomplice but does not name her.
When the killings began. Arabic Post places the killings between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, without dates. Yabiladi ties the case to the disappearances noticed in 1906. The date of no single killing is recorded.
The proceedings. The published accounts describe no hearing, no judge and no evidence. The statement that he was found guilty comes from the 1906 cable; the statement that he confessed comes from the 1906 cable and from Arabic Post. By the reports' own account, both Annah's statement and his confession followed harsh treatment.
Saeida Rouass, a British-Moroccan writer from East London, turned the case into a detective novel, Assembly of the Dead, published in 2017, according to her essay for the Crime Readers' Association. Its Arabic title is Jemaa el-Fnaa, Yabiladi reported. The story follows a fictional investigator from Tangier, Farook al Alami, sent to look into the killings. The book was launched in Marrakech in 2018, and a Hollywood producer later took an interest in adapting it for the screen, according to Yabiladi and the British Moroccan community organization Al-Hasaniya, which described the novel in 2020 as being about the murders of 36 women in Marrakesh at the start of the twentieth century. The novel is fiction.
1894: Moulay Abdelaziz becomes sultan of Morocco (Yabiladi).
1905, March 8: the American consulate at Tangier is raised to a legation (Office of the Historian).
1906: the Algeciras Conference on the future of Morocco (Rouass, in Yabiladi).
1906, spring: young women are reported missing in Marrakesh; by April the disappearances are widely noticed.
1906, April (before May 2): the family of one missing young woman traces her to Mesfewi's shop; the older woman named Annah is seized, names him and dies; Mesfewi is arrested and confesses; the remains of 36 young women are recovered in Marrakesh.
1906, May 2: the date set for his crucifixion, which is put off after foreign officials object; beheading is announced instead.
1906, May 15: daily public floggings in the Marrakesh market begin.
1906, June 11 (Monday): he is walled up alive in the market of Marrakesh.
1906, June 13: his date of death as given by Arabic Post.
1906, June 28: The Times and Democrat of South Carolina prints the cable from Tangier.
1912: Morocco becomes a French protectorate (Office of the Historian).
2017: Saeida Rouass publishes Assembly of the Dead, a novel based on the case.
2020, June: Yabiladi publishes histories of the case in English and French.
2024, May 14: Arabic Post includes the case in a survey of Moroccan criminal history.