Between the end of 1919 and November 1920, seventeen women disappeared from the poor quarters around the Labban police station in Alexandria. Their bodies were found under the floors of rooms rented by two sisters, Raya and Sakina Ali Hammam, and by members of their household. In May 1921 an Alexandria criminal court convicted the sisters, their husbands and two other men of the murders of 17 women and sentenced all six to death. Raya and Sakina were hanged at Hadra Prison in Alexandria on December 21, 1921.
The case is one of the most retold crime stories in the Arab world. Films, stage comedies and television series have kept the sisters' names alive for a century, and Egyptian parents still use them to frighten children. The written record is less simple than the legend. The court judgment, as it survives in a published transcription, found that the four men were the principal killers and that the sisters were accomplices who brought the women to the rooms, served them drink and helped hold them. Historians who have read the police and court files argue that the newspapers of 1920 and 1921 turned two poor women into the face of a crime in which the men did most of the killing.
In Arabic the pair are known as ريا وسكينة (Raya wa Sakina). English sources spell the elder sister's name Raya, Rayya, Reya, Rea or Ria, and the younger sister's Sakina, Sekina or Sakeena. The variation comes from transliterating the same Arabic letters: ريا has a doubled y sound that some writers mark as Rayya and others drop. Their father was Ali Hammam (همام), so the sisters appear as Raya and Sakina Ali Hammam, as Raya and Sakina Bint Hammam ("daughters of Hammam"), and in Salah Eissa's history as "the Hammam sisters." Hammam is sometimes misspelled Hamman in English.
Egyptian practice of the period identified people by their own name, their father's name and sometimes a family or nickname. Most English-language historians and academic writers call the sisters Raya and Sakina. The others in the case appear in the forms those writers use:
Hasaballah Saeed Maraei (حسب الله), Raya's husband, also written Hasb Allah, Hasballah or Hassab Allah.
Mohammed Abdel Aal (محمد عبد العال), Sakina's husband, also written Abd El-'Al or Abdul Aal.
Orabi Hassan (عرابي), a local strongman and brothel doorman.
Abdel Razeq Youssef (عبد الرازق), a cart driver and the gang's other strongman, also written Abdel Razek or Abdul Razik.
Ali, the goldsmith (علي الصائغ), named in Arab News as Ali Muhammad Hassan.
Very little is documented about the sisters' early lives. The writer and historian Salah Eissa, who spent years in the case file, estimated that Raya was born about 1875 and Sakina about ten years later; neither date is recorded. He traced the family to a village called al-Kilh in the far south of Egypt, which accounts place near Aswan or in Sohag, and recorded that the family moved north to Kafr al-Zayyat, a cotton-ginning town in the Nile Delta where work was seasonal. A 2019 Al Jazeera documentary feature, drawing on the same research, describes a childhood of poverty in which the girls worked in cafes, sold vegetables and labored in the cotton fields.
Raya married a laborer from the south. After his death she married his brother, Hasaballah, in 1909, according to Eissa. Their daughter, then a child, would later become a witness in the case. Arab News described Hasaballah as a thief and hashish smuggler who had been banished from Kafr al-Zayyat.
Sakina's path was different. Eissa records that she was registered as a sex worker in Tanta, the Delta's largest town, married a hospital nurse named Ahmed Ragab, and later married Mohammed Abdel Aal, a man from Mosha in Asyut province. Al Jazeera's account says she went to Alexandria in 1913 and that Raya, Hasaballah and their daughter followed about three years later. Nefertiti Takla, a historian who studied the court files, notes that by the time of the trial Sakina and her husband were divorced and Raya and her husband were living apart.
The sisters reached Alexandria as the First World War began. Britain had occupied Egypt since 1882, declared it a protectorate in 1914 and ruled it under martial law through the war. Eissa describes a city of nearly half a million people in which the collapse of the cotton trade threw thousands out of work within weeks. He estimates that about 1.2 million Egyptians worked on Allied war projects, some by force and some for wages. Takla found that the sisters' husbands worked as manual laborers for the British Army in the second half of the war; Eissa places Abdel Aal in Iraq from 1917 to 1919, Orabi Hassan in the Levant and Hasaballah on the Greek island of Lemnos.
During the war the sisters made a living in the clandestine sex trade. The colonial state had licensed and taxed prostitution since 1882 and required weekly medical examinations; Takla found that many women preferred unlicensed work because it paid better and carried less public stigma. Independent workers paid the sisters half of each client's fee. One of their houses stood near a British army camp. Eissa records that Sakina also sold meat to the camp, and that the family ran a hashish den in Harat al-Nagaa.
The husbands came home in November 1919, Takla found, and the killings began soon afterward. By then the war trade was over, clients were fewer, and Egypt was in the middle of the 1919 revolution against British rule, with curfews and checkpoints in the cities. Takla argues that the husbands took more control of the business, that local strongmen who frequented the houses drove workers away, and that the sisters turned to recruiting poor teenage girls and to a trafficking network that sent girls from the south to licensed brothels. In her reading, control over the women who worked in this trade, as much as their jewelry, was the motive for the killings. The prosecution and the court treated the motive as robbery.
Eissa identifies Abdel Razeq Youssef, a cart driver from Labban with 19 previous offenses, as the man who drew the household into organized crime in the autumn of 1919. Orabi Hassan, born in 1892 near Abnoub in Asyut province, worked as a customs porter and was known in the neighborhood as a futuwwa, a local strongman.
The court described a fixed pattern. A woman known to the household would be invited to one of the rented rooms, either by the sisters or at their request. She would be given strong drink until she could not resist or call out. The men then strangled or suffocated her with a cloth or by hand while the others held her arms, legs and body. Her jewelry and money were taken, and she was buried under the floor of the room. The sisters sold the jewelry through the goldsmith and divided the money among the six.
The court found that Orabi Hassan carried out most of the strangling. Eissa's reconstruction adds that Raya, at least at the start, was the only member of the household who brought the women in, and that Sakina was first paid for her silence rather than her help.
The medical evidence is reported in two ways. The judgment, as transcribed, says the autopsy reports showed strangulation by several hands. Eissa, as summarized by Sky News Arabia in 2021, wrote that the forensic doctors, Sidney Smith and Abdel Hamid Ammar, found no fractures of the hyoid bone in the neck and suspected suffocation rather than manual strangling. Both accounts agree that the women were killed by the men in the room while the others held them.
The judgment and the historians name only some of the 17. Several bodies could never be identified, and Arab News reported that most of the unidentified women were thought to have been sex workers or women who had left home. Most of the victims, Takla found, had worked in the unlicensed trade during the war, often in the sisters' own houses, and Eissa describes others who worked at markets, sold goods or served in households. Several were known to their families to own gold jewelry, which in the poor quarters of Alexandria was how a woman kept her savings.
Khadra Mohammed al-Lami was, by Eissa's count, the first, killed on about December 20, 1919. Arab News, in a 2007 account, gives the first victim as Hanem, a neighbor of Raya's who had bought new jewelry; the judgment also lists a victim named Hanem. The sources do not settle whether these are the same killing.
Nazla Aboulleil (also written Nazla Abu al-Layl) is the woman about whom most is known, because Eissa devoted a long chapter to her. She was born and raised in Bab Sidra, an Alexandria neighborhood. She married first at 16; that marriage ended in divorce after two years. She later married a neighbor, Ibrahim Saeed, a carter who was often ill, and she worked at the local market to support them both. She became known as a skilled seamstress who made clothes for women in the neighborhoods of Maskoubiya and Farahda. Her mother, Zeinab bint Hassan, visited her every day and disliked her friendship with Raya. By late 1919 Nazla was widowed and living alone in a rented room, and she had saved enough to buy eight gold bracelets, gold earrings and a ring. Orabi Hassan had been her companion for years and, according to the judgment, had once wanted to marry her. Eissa dates her death to January 4, 1920, in Raya's room in Harat Ali Bey el-Kebir. Accounts give her age as 24 (New Lines) or 25 (Arab News). Her mother was the first relative to report a missing daughter to the police.
Salima, known as Umm Arafat, sold kerosene and lived alone in Labban. A January 1921 American wire report said she was the first of the victims detectives identified.
Zanouba went to the market, met Raya, and did not come home, her brother told the police.
Fatma Abd Rabou, 50, was reported missing by her husband. Arab News listed 54 pounds in cash, 18 gold wristlets, bracelets and earrings among what she carried. The judgment names a Fatma who worked as a domestic servant; whether this is the same woman is not clear from the transcription.
Two women named Nabawiya appear in the judgment, one the wife of a fishmonger and the other a worker in a coffeehouse. Nabawiya bint Ali was the woman whose body was found first, in November 1920; she had been missing for about three months.
Anisa had accused Abdel Razeq Youssef of theft and threatened to expose him. The court accepted that he had a personal motive to kill her and found that he did.
A poultry seller was reported missing by her 15-year-old daughter. Fahima is named in one confession. Fardous bint Fadl Allah, whose mother reported her missing, was the seventeenth and last, killed on November 12, 1920. She was wearing gold bracelets and a gold necklace worth about 60 pounds, Arab News reported, and her last movements led the police to Sakina's name.
The women's families did report them missing. The judgment records that ten missing-person reports had been filed by families in the district before the first body was found, and that the prosecution had shelved them. Eissa found that one family's complaint was closed by the police on February 23, 1920. Mahmoud Morsi, reporting his sister missing, was the first to name the sisters as the last people seen with her, according to a 2024 Egyptian press account, but the police did not treat them as suspects at first. When police traced Fardous's last movements in November 1920, Sakina was questioned and denied everything.
On November 14 or 15, 1920 (sources differ by a day), a man renovating a building at No. 5 Makoris Alley, behind the Labban police station, dug under the floor of a ground-floor room to lay water pipes. New Lines Magazine names him as Ahmed Mursi, the landlord's nephew, working for an Italian tenant's family; UCLA's account describes him as an elderly man whose family managed the building. He found human remains. They were later identified as those of Nabawiya bint Ali. The room had earlier been rented by Sakina. Further digging uncovered two more bodies there, and a fourth was found in a room in Harat al-Nagaa.
Accounts differ on the next step. Arab News reported that a police officer noticed that Raya was burning incense over and over in her room, which she explained by saying that her customers drank and smoked there; the officer, knowing she was Sakina's sister, reported his suspicion, and a senior officer who searched Sakina's room noticed newer floor tiles that turned out to cover more bodies. Recent Egyptian press accounts credit a police captain (yuzbashi) named Ibrahim Hamdi with noticing the incense at Raya's room in Harat Ali Bey el-Kebir and ordering the floor opened. The judgment as transcribed does not tell the story of the incense.
Over about two months, police searched every room the family had rented and recovered the bodies of 17 women. The judgment records that 12 came from a single room. A Reuters report in 2022 relayed a local guide's account that 12 were found at the last house on Ali Bey el-Kebir Street, three at Sakina's first house and two in Harat al-Nagaa, but that account is local tradition, not the court's.
Chiti's study of Al-Ahram dates the arrests of the sisters, their husbands and others to November 1920. Raya confessed first, according to Arab News, in Sakina's presence, and tried to shift blame onto her husband. A wire report printed in an American newspaper in January 1921 said instead that the confessions began when Sakina broke her silence after a month in jail. Raya's daughter, then about nine, was questioned and testified against the adults; her testimony, quoted at length by Eissa, describes a hungry and frightened child who was locked in at night and refused a garland that had belonged to one of the dead women because she feared being found out.
Physical evidence supported the confessions: the bodies themselves, clothing and jewelry found with the defendants, a seal belonging to Hasaballah found with the remains, and the goldsmith's account of the household coming to sell gold. The judgment says the goldsmith bought secretly, at less than half the value, and broke up many pieces to destroy their identity; Eissa found that jewelry worth 32 pounds had been accepted for 18 without question.
The sisters both told investigators that the men forced them to take part. Sakina said she had been threatened, and Raya said she had been beaten when she objected. The court accepted their confessions in substance but not those claims of coercion. Mohammed Abdel Aal admitted to two or more killings and then withdrew his confession, saying the police had forced it; the court relied on it anyway, noting that he held a victim's clothing. Hasaballah also retracted, and the court rejected the retraction because he had repeated detailed facts over a long period. Orabi Hassan denied everything; the court rejected his denials because several witnesses placed him at the houses and linked him to Nazla.
Al-Ahram, the main national daily, covered the case systematically from November 1920. Elena Chiti of Stockholm University, who studied that coverage, found that the paper built the case in national terms, singled out the sisters, often referred to the men only as "Raya's husband" and "Sakina's husband," and condemned the women before trial. Takla found that Egyptian editorials of the period portrayed the sisters as barbaric women from the south who threatened to drag the nation backward, and that newspapers such as Wadi al-Nil, al-Umma and al-Basir followed the story closely. Eissa records that one daily ran a column on the case every day for two months and that posters carrying the sisters' photographs circulated. Chiti compared the case with an earlier series of killings of women by a man in Tanta, which drew far less attention and has been forgotten.
Foreign papers carried the story too, with errors. An NEA wire report from Alexandria printed in the Evening Journal of Wilmington, Delaware, on January 21, 1921, under the name "Rayya," spoke of more than thirty women found buried in the "Lebhan" district (the scanned text is partly illegible) and claimed that some victims were tourists or daughters of prominent Alexandrian families. Nothing in the court record supports either claim.
Ten people stood trial before the Alexandria Criminal Court in May 1921 in the case brought by the public prosecution. On May 12 the court sent the file to the Mufti of Alexandria for his opinion, as the law then required in capital cases, and the opinion came back on May 15. The verdict was read in public on Monday, May 16, 1921 (8 Ramadan 1339), at the Alexandria Native Court building. Arab News gives the presiding judge as Chief Magistrate Ahmed Bey Musa; the transcription of the judgment does not name the judges.
The court found that the houses had been used secretly for prostitution, with the sisters sharing the profits. It found the 17 killings premeditated and said that nothing as cruel had come before the Egyptian courts since they were founded. Defense requests for mercy, for a mental examination of one defendant and for a lesser charge for another were refused. Takla has written that the prosecutor blocked a psychiatric evaluation of Hasaballah.
The verdicts were:
Raya and Sakina: guilty of complicity by agreement and assistance in the 17 murders (Penal Code Articles 40, 41 and related provisions). Sentenced to death.
Hasaballah Saeed Maraei, Mohammed Abdel Aal, Orabi Hassan and Abdel Razeq Youssef: guilty as principals of premeditated murder (Articles 194 and related). Sentenced to death.
Ali, the goldsmith: guilty of receiving stolen property. Five years' imprisonment with hard labor.
Salama, known as al-Kit, whom Sakina and Hasaballah had accused; Amina, known as Umm Ahmed; and her husband Mohammed, known as al-Nass, both accused of complicity in one killing: acquitted for insufficient evidence.
Civil claims against the goldsmith and the acquitted defendants were rejected.
The judgment is the reason historians say the sisters were sentenced as accomplices. Takla and Chiti both stress the point. Takla, who found it surprising that the sisters were hanged when three other accused accomplices went free, cites a journalist's report that the prosecutor had overheard Sakina say that with a life sentence she would be out in 15 or 20 years and back on the street; he asked the court to cut "these two corrupt members" off from the nation. Chiti has argued that the sisters were sentenced to death because they were women, not because they were the main killers, while stressing that this does not make them innocent.
Raya and Sakina were hanged at Hadra Prison in Alexandria on Wednesday, December 21, 1921. Eissa records that a black flag was raised over the prison to signal the executions and that the crowd outside cheered the hangman. Youm7 reported that hundreds gathered and that the Governor of Alexandria, Mohamed Haddaya Pasha, and the city's security chief attended to confirm that the sentence was carried out. Sky News Arabia, marking the centenary, reported that women from the working-class quarters sang and danced outside the prison.
The prison medical report records Sakina's last words, as quoted by Hannah El-Hitami in New Lines: that she was a strong woman, that she had killed seventeen women and fooled the government. El-Hitami notes that this contradicts Sakina's earlier testimony that the men forced her, and that no evidence shows Sakina personally killed anyone; the words may have been defiance rather than a statement of fact.
The reports give no separate date for the hanging of the four men. The English introduction to the Jadaliyya translation of Eissa's book says that all six were hanged in December 1921.
Raya's daughter was placed in an orphanage or shelter. Arab News says she died a few years later; Al Jazeera says she died in a fire.
The claim appears in almost every account, but the wording varies. Takla's dissertation abstract calls them the first women in Egyptian history to receive the death penalty. Chiti writes that they were the first women sentenced to death in the Egyptian secular justice system. Qantara and New Lines say they were the first women in Egypt executed on the basis of a death sentence. Gulf News says they were believed to be the first women executed under a court order in modern Egypt. None of them names an earlier woman executed by an Egyptian court. Because the qualifiers differ (sentenced or executed; modern, secular or all of history), the claim stands most securely in its narrower form: the first women executed under a sentence of the modern Egyptian courts, according to most historians who have written on the case.
The popular story and the documents part ways on several points.
Who killed. In popular memory the sisters are the killers and masterminds. The court found the four men to be the principals and the sisters accomplices who lured the women, served the drink and helped hold them. Eissa titled his history The Men of Raya and Sakina to put the men back at the center, and Takla has suggested calling the case "the 1921 murder cases" rather than by the sisters' names. Sakina's last words, claiming the killings for herself, are the main support for the popular version and are themselves contradicted by her earlier statements.
How they killed. A widely repeated account, which the writer Latifa al-Zayyat heard as a child from her mother, has the bodies dismembered and burned in an oven while zar drumming covered the screams. Eissa rejected all of it from the case file: the skeletons were found intact, and the household was too poor to own an oven. He also suggested that some of these details were borrowed from the French case of Henri Landru, sentenced to death in Paris in late 1921.
How many died. The court and every serious history give 17. A 1921 American wire report spoke of more than thirty and of tourists and wealthy daughters among the dead. The screenwriter Ahmed Ashour has spoken of 97 further bodies, a figure Al Jazeera notes has been questioned. No court record supports any number above 17, and neither do the historians who have studied the case file.
Why they killed. The court found robbery. Takla doubts that jewelry alone explains killings that could have been simple thefts and points to quarrels with former workers, competition in the trade and Hasaballah's own conduct; she has raised the possibility that he was a serial rapist. These are a historian's hypotheses, not findings.
Innocence and the anti-colonial story. Since about 2015 Ashour has argued that the sisters were innocent members of a secret wing of the 1919 revolution, framed by the British, and that the Labban house was built about 20 years after the executions. He has cited documents he says he holds and a descendant of the first investigator. Eissa, before his death, rejected the claim. Chiti found no historical source that supports it and links its popularity to disappointment after Egypt's 2011 revolution. The confessions, the bodies, the goldsmith's evidence and the judgment all stand against it.
Remains. No reliable report says that any remains of the sisters or their victims were preserved or displayed.
The first film, Raya wa Sakina (1953), was directed by Salah Abu Seif, with a screenplay to which the novelist Naguib Mahfouz contributed, and starred Negma Ibrahim, Zouzou Hamdi el-Hakim, Farid Shawqi and Anwar Wagdi. A comedy, Ismail Yassin Meets Raya and Sakina, followed in 1955. A comedy stage version of the mid-1980s, starring Shadia, Suhair el-Babli, Abdel Moneim Madbouly and Ahmed Bedeir, used the story to satirize contemporary social ills; Takla dates it to 1985. A further film appeared in 1983. In 2005 Egyptian television broadcast a 35-episode Ramadan series based on Eissa's book, with Abla Kamel and Somaya el-Khashab as the sisters. In 2021 the producers Yalla Yalla announced an English-and-Arabic series, The Alexandria Killings, written by Terry George and Mariam Naoum.
Salah Eissa's history, Rijal Raya wa Sakina (The Men of Raya and Sakina), began with a chance find in 1993, when he saw criminal case no. 23 of 1920, filed at the Labban police station, in an index at Egypt's National Center for Judicial Studies. He described a file of about 2,200 foolscap pages of complaints, interrogations, court sessions and seized evidence. The book was first published about twenty years before 2023 and reissued by Dar al-Karma; Eissa died in 2017.
In Labban, the case has become a local attraction. Saeed Mohammed opened a kiosk named "Bazaar Raya and Sakina" on the site of the old police station, across from Sakina's former home, and hangs portraits of the sisters, their husbands and the investigating officer on a nearby wall, New Lines reported in 2023. Gulf News and Reuters described residents turning the front of a dilapidated house into an informal street exhibit with photographs, the court's execution order and other mementos, and visitors coming from Egypt and abroad; Reuters advised that the building itself was unsafe to enter. Qantara reported that the Police Museum in Cairo also commemorates the case. These are local or informal displays, not an official museum at the Labban station.
The sisters' image has shifted with each era. Chiti, quoted by El-Hitami, describes them moving from symbols of evil to victims of poverty and, for some, anti-colonial fighters, and says that each period builds its own version of them. What does not change in the record is the list of 17 women, most of them poor working women of Alexandria, whose families reported them missing to police who did not look.
About 1875 and about 1885: Raya and Sakina born in Upper Egypt (Eissa's estimates).
1909: Raya marries Hasaballah, her late first husband's brother.
1913: Sakina settles in Alexandria; Raya, Hasaballah and their daughter follow about three years later.
1914 to 1918: Britain declares a protectorate and rules Egypt under martial law; the sisters run unlicensed brothels; the husbands later work as laborers for the British Army.
1919: Revolution against British rule. The husbands return in November; the household is drawn into organized crime in the autumn, according to Eissa.
About December 20, 1919: Khadra Mohammed al-Lami killed, the first victim in Eissa's count.
January 4, 1920: Nazla Aboulleil killed in Raya's room (Eissa).
February 23, 1920: police close a family's missing-person complaint.
1920: further killings; ten missing-person reports shelved by the prosecution.
November 12, 1920: Fardous bint Fadl Allah, the seventeenth victim, killed.
November 14 or 15, 1920: remains of Nabawiya bint Ali found under a room once rented by Sakina at No. 5 Makoris Alley.
November 1920 to January 1921: arrests, searches of all the family's rooms, confessions; 17 bodies recovered.
January 21, 1921: an American newspaper carries a wire report of the case.
May 12 to 15, 1921: case file referred to the Mufti of Alexandria.
May 16, 1921: six sentenced to death, the goldsmith to five years, three acquitted.
December 21, 1921: Raya and Sakina hanged at Hadra Prison, Alexandria.
1953: Salah Abu Seif's film Raya wa Sakina.
1993: Salah Eissa finds case file no. 23 of 1920.
2005: 35-episode television series based on Eissa's book.
2017: Eissa dies.
2020 to 2021: academic studies by Elena Chiti and Nefertiti Takla.
December 21, 2021: centenary of the executions.