On February 7, 2007 a nurse in Settat walked past the man who had raped her three weeks before. She had reported the attack to the judicial police and nothing had come of it. This time she went straight to the police headquarters, officers went back with her to where she had seen him, and they arrested him there. He was Hicham Raoui, a thirty-year-old street vendor. He admitted the rape to the police, denied it before the criminal chamber of the Settat Court of Appeal, and was not believed; the nurse's evidence, Aujourd'hui Le Maroc reported, was compelling. He was sentenced to a year in prison.
Five days before that arrest, a young woman from the Annahda quarter named Fatima Zahra Hajjaj, twenty, had disappeared. Six days after it, on Tuesday, February 13, her body was found near the abattoirs district of the town. Her father could not understand why she had been found somewhere that had nothing to do with the route she meant to take. The police had no lead. Nobody connected her death to the man they had just locked up for rape, and for the year he spent in prison the quarter lived with the fear that her killer was still among them.
He was released on Thursday, February 7, 2008, when the twelve months were up. Within days he killed again. Nezha Mansar was twenty-two and had just finished her studies; she also lived in Annahda. Her body was found two days after she disappeared, on the national road number nine, and the autopsy found that she had been raped both before and after death. The investigators now had two killings with the same features and concluded they were looking for one man.
Nawal Taâlabi, twenty-one or twenty-two by different reports, was a student at the Institute of Applied Technology and lived in the same quarter. She left home on the afternoon of Sunday, March 9, 2008 and did not come back. Her father, who had been away, came home and searched for her himself, and on Tuesday, March 11 he found her body, hidden in a pit covered with trees behind the industrial quarter, near the Oued Abou Moussa.
Her body was taken to Casablanca for the post-mortem, and forensic officers lifted fingerprints from it. They matched the prints taken from Raoui the year before. He was arrested on the afternoon of Monday, March 17, 2008, offered no resistance, and confessed quickly to all three killings. He said, according to LesEco, that he had enjoyed the rapes but did not understand why he had killed the women. He had approached each of them with charm, and they went with him willingly to the place where he attacked them.
He was born in 1976 in the Aïn Darbane area of Settat province, the youngest of three. His father repudiated his mother before he was born, and under the rules of the time she lost the marital home; she took the children to her father, a guard at a primary school, who supported them. The family moved from the village to the Al Amal quarter of Settat. He started at the Tawhid school at seven and left after the fifth year of primary school. He was apprenticed to a bicycle repairer, went from one odd job to another, and from 1996 worked as a street vendor. In 2003 he tried his luck in Agadir and Marrakech and came back.
People who knew him described a pleasant, reserved young man who neither drank nor smoked. At twenty-nine, in 2005, he started drinking. "A few beers were enough for him to feel free and chase girls," a young man who knew him at the Souk D'hab told Aujourd'hui Le Maroc. A police source told the paper he had been drinking when he attacked the nurse.
The criminal chamber at Settat sentenced him to death in 2008. LesEco reports that he was convicted of four rapes and three murders. Morocco retains the death penalty in law but has carried out no execution since 1993, and in 2019 LesEco reported that he was still on death row. Most accounts give the date of his arrest as March 17, 2008; LesEco gives March 28, the date Aujourd'hui Le Maroc published its reconstruction of the case.