Hicham Raoui was born in 1976 in the Ain Darbane area of Settat province, in central Morocco. His father repudiated his mother before he was born, and under the practice of the time she was left without the marital home, so she took her children away. He was the youngest of three and grew up without a father. He never learned a trade and was unemployed when he was arrested at thirty-two. He had already served a prison sentence for rape.
The first body was found on Saturday February 11, 2007, near the abattoirs district of Settat. She was twenty and lived in the Annahda quarter of the town. A few days later a second young woman, twenty-two, was found on the national road number nine. She lived in the same quarter as the first. The police investigation produced nothing.
For the next year the Annahda quarter believed that a killer was taking its daughters, and it was frightened.
The third victim was twenty-one or twenty-two and lived in the same quarter again. She was studying at the Institute of Applied Technology, and left home on the afternoon of Sunday March 9, 2008 and did not come back. Her family reported her missing. Her father, who had been away, came home and searched for her himself, and it was he who found her body, hidden in a pit covered over with trees behind the industrial quarter, not far from the Oued Abou Moussa. That was Tuesday March 11.
Her body was taken to Casablanca for a post-mortem examination. Forensic officers recovered fingerprints from it, and those prints identified the man who had killed her. He was arrested on the afternoon of Monday March 17, 2008. What the investigators had not expected was that he had also killed the other two.
The police said he offered no resistance at all and explained readily how he had committed the crimes. At the time of his arrest a police source would not confirm publicly that the three deaths were one man's work, on the ground that the investigation was still running.
The three victims are named in the roster as Fatima Zahra Hajjaj, twenty; Nezha Mansar, twenty-two; and Nawal Taalabi, twenty-two, though the contemporary report gives the third as twenty-one and does not name any of them.
He was sentenced to death. Morocco has executed no one since 1993. Nothing accessible records anything about him since the sentence, which is also the position of the other Moroccan case in this archive, Abdelaali Hadi.
The sourcing is French-language Moroccan press reporting, principally Aujourd'hui Le Maroc.