The story of Raya and Sakina in 1920

Raya and Sakina Ali Hammam, two Egyptian sisters, are among the most famous butchers in Egypt. They were famous for forming a gang to lure women and kill them for theft between December 1919 and November 1920, which caused panic in the city of Alexandria at that time. They immigrated at the beginning of their lives, accompanied by their mother and their older brother (Abu El-Ela), from Upper Egypt to the center of Kafr El-Zayat, and then to the city of Alexandria. And pimping and facilitating secret prostitution, [1] until they ended up luring women and killing them with the aim of seizing their gold jewelry in partnership with Muhammad Abdel-Al, Sukaina’s husband, who started her life as a prostitute, and according to God Saeed Marei, Raya’s husband, and two others, Orabi Hassan and Abdel-Razek Youssef .[2][3]

They were arrested and charged with premeditated murder of 17 women. They were convicted by the court, and were executed on December 21 and 22, 1921. Raya and Sakina are the first two women to be executed in the history of modern Egypt.[4][5]

Although the gang was composed of 6 individuals (Raya, Sakina, Hasaballah, Abd al-Aal, Orabi and Abd al-Razek), their story became famous in the media as “Raya and Sakina.” Many artworks of the same name also dealt with it, as their story inspired many makers. Art and amounted to about 12 artworks, including films, series, plays, and radio works, to be the most personalities whose story was quoted in Arab artworks,[6] and several books were published about their lives and crimes, the most famous of which is the book (Raya and Sakina’s Men) written by Salah Issa in 2002.[7]

Early life[edit]

Raya was born in the village of Al-Kalah in the Edfu district of Aswan Governorate in the far reaches of Upper Egypt in approximately 1875, while Sakina was born in Kafr El-Zayat in approximately 1885[8][9]. Their father died at a young age, then the family moved to Beni Suef and then to Kafr El-Zayat, where the two sisters were working in collecting cotton. “Ria” married Hasabullah Saeed Merhi and gave birth to a girl named “Badi’a” and another child who died shortly after his birth, then she moved Sakina and her new husband moved to Alexandria to live in the Al-Lubban neighborhood around 1913[10]. Later, her sister Raya joined her with her family. Sakina divorced her husband and married Muhammad Abdel-Al, who was their neighbor at the time.

With the severe economic conditions that the region faced during World War I and the spread of unemployment and poverty, the family turned to illegal work and secret prostitution, [11] Then they began to think of stealing gold jewelry from the women and then burying them in a hidden way without leaving any trace.

The gang's activity began when the two sisters used to seduce and deceive the victim with sweet words in order to gain her confidence, then they would give her strong-acting wine that would lead her to drunkenness and intoxication, so she would lose the ability to focus and the strength to resist, and then each member of the gang would take a role in the process of killing the victim by She held her breath, and the accused, Mohamed Abdel-Al, was the first to add to the investigation the first details of how the victims were killed and buried, thus denying all that was rumored that the gang was strangling women, as his statements matched the reports of forensic doctors who asserted that the killing was done by holding the breath and not In any other way, and about the distribution of roles among them during the killing process, Mohamed Abdel-Al said that his role in most of the operations was to paralyze the victim's feet, while another paralyzed her arms, and the third fixed her head so that the latter could hold her breath with a handkerchief soaked in water until she breathed her last [ 12], and as soon as the victim died, they stripped her of her jewelry, gold jewelry, and clothes, then buried her in the same place where she was killed, and the two sisters used to sell the stolen gold to one of the goldsmiths in the market, and then divide its price with the rest of the gang members.

Police investigation[edit]

The police began to carry out investigations due to reports of the disappearance of women in Alexandria. The beginning was in mid-January 1920, when Mrs. Zainab Hassan, 40 years old, submitted a report to the Alexandria Police Hakamdar about the disappearance of her 25-year-old daughter, Nazla Abu El-Lail. ten days ago. She said that she was adorned with golden ornaments in her hand. The mother's communication ended with her fearing that her daughter might have been killed by an actor to steal her gold.

They were not reached due to many difficulties and obstacles. The most prominent reasons put forward by some historians and writers were:

The spread of the phenomenon of women escaping from their families at that time because of poverty or love, which justifies the possibility of a person’s disappearance for those reasons and excludes the idea of murder or kidnapping.

It is that the women’s dress, which was widespread at the time, was the black robe and the face covering, and therefore no one could identify any woman or distinguish between them.

The absence of any identity papers at the time, which made it difficult to find the disappeared persons.

That the two sisters used to lure women who were previously related to them or could gain their trust, and therefore the victim used to enter the house of her own free will without making any noise or suspicions.

The police never suspected that the criminals were women, and therefore the investigations focused on the male suspects, and no one ever thought or doubted that it was a women's gang. Likewise, the male gang members did not participate in the luring operations, which were rather the specialty of Raya and Sakina only.

Discovery of gang organization[edit]

The gang's activity continued to lure and kill the victims until it reached 17 women (from the investigations), until their crimes were discovered by chance. The beginning was on the morning of December 11, 1920, when Yuzbashi Ibrahim Hamdi, deputy warden of the frankincense department in Alexandria, received a telephone signal from the patrol soldier on Abi Street. Al-Darda found the corpse of a woman on the public road, and the sign confirms the presence of bone remains and long head hair with the bones of the skull and all the organs of the body separated from each other. Next to the corpse is a veil of black gauze and a black drink with white stripes, and the owner of the corpse cannot be identified.

After the appearance of the two unknown bodies, one of the secret informants spread all over Alexandria in search of any news regarding the disappearance of women, this informant, whose name was Ahmed Al-Barqi, noticed an intense smell of incense emanating from Raya's room on the ground floor of Khadija Umm Hassab's house on Ali Bek Al-Kabeer Street, and the informant confirmed that the incense smoke was He starts suspiciously from the window of the room, which aroused his suspicions, so he decided to enter the room, which became very confused when the informant asked her about the secret of this amount of incense. Police officers, informants, and the arrivals to the room, they found a wooden crate used for storage, and the officer orders to evacuate the room and remove the crate, but the officer discovers that the tiles above the floor of the room and under the crate are newly installed, unlike the rest of the room’s tiles, so he orders the removal of the tiles, and when they were removed, the smell of mold escalated in a way that no one could bear, then they were removed The largest amount of tiles reveals the body of a woman. Raya becomes terrified and her confusion increases, while the officer orders to complete the excavation and keep the body until he issues a report of the incident in the station. He takes Raya with him to the frankincense department, but he hardly reaches the gate of the department until he is notified that the second body has been found, but he stumbles. The force in Raya’s room contains irrefutable and decisive evidence, which is the seal of Hasabullah, which is tied to a circular rope. It seems that Hasabullah was hanging it around his neck and fell from it while burying one of the bodies. Raya could no longer deny it, especially after a new report reached the officer from his men that a third body had been found. .

Raya is forced to admit that she did not participate in the killing, but there were men who came to the room with women, and that they committed the crimes during her absence, and she identified the two men as Orabi and Ahmed Al-Jedr. The bodies that were found in Raya's house, then investigations arrived from a son named Muhammad Al-Shahat, confirming that Raya was renting another room in Al-Najat neighborhood from Sidi Iskandar Street. The police force was quickly transferred to the new address, the two rooms were evacuated, and new bodies were discovered.

The officers go to the homes of all the arrested suspects, and Lieutenant Ahmed Abdullah of the Investigation Force finds jewelry, photos and a bill of exchange worth one hundred and twenty pounds in the house of the accused, Orabi Hassan. Another house in Karmouz, and I left this house under the pretext that the area was bad, and when digging, a new woman's body was discovered.

The strongest evidence was finding prophetic robes in Sukaina's house, and some of the women of Prophet's friends confirmed that the robe belonged to her. Sakeena admitted that it was a prophetic robe, but she said that the prevailing custom among the women in the neighborhood is that they exchange robes, and that she gave the prophet a robe and took this robe from her[13]. [14]

Crime scenes[edit]

The houses that witnessed the crimes were four, and they were all located near Al-Manshia Square, and the addresses of the houses were exactly:[14]

No. 5 Makoris Street in Karmouz neighborhood.

No. 38 Ali Bey El Kabeer Street.

No. 6 Lifeline Lane.

No. 8 life lane.

Investigations

Raya was the first to decide to confess early, who admitted that she was a naive woman, and that men used to come to her room with women during her absence, then kill the women before she came, and that she only attended one murder. Confessions so that her aunt Sakina and her husband would not take revenge on her, and indeed they reassured her, so she confessed the facts of luring women to her aunt's house and men slaughtering and burying them. .

While Sakina tells in the rest of her confessions the story of the murder of 17 women and girls, but she confirms that her sister Raya was the one who implicated her the first time in exchange for three pounds, and after that she was getting her share of each crime without having the objection for fear that her husband Abdel-Al and his men would kill her.

The case had occupied public opinion in Egypt and the news of the arrest of the accused had topped the headlines, but the investigations did not pass easily due to the conflicting accounts of the accused, the multiplicity of threads and the lack of sufficient evidence, which may lead to the failure of resolving the case and the perpetrators escaping from justice, until Kamel Bey Aziz, the representative of the deputy, is forced The general in Alexandria apologized for the case after 12 days of investigations to no avail, and it did not reach any compelling evidence against Raya and Sakina.

Immediately, the Public Prosecutor assigned Suleiman Bey Aziz, the Deputy Public Prosecutor and the Chief Prosecutor of Cairo, to complete the investigations, and he was able to tie the strings of the case and resolve it three days after his arrival. Raya’s daughter, “Badi’a”, was interrogated, and she admitted that she witnessed the crimes, and with her confrontation with Raya, she was forced to confess, and with Confronting the defendants with evidence and the confessions of others, they ended up confessing to committing these crimes.

Victims

The majority of the victims of the gang of Raya and Sakina’s men were prostitutes who had previously dealt with the gang members, as most of them worked in the brothels that Raya and Sakina managed secretly, and their number reached 17 women according to the confessions of the gang members, only 14 of them were identified, and the rest of the bodies were not remembered None of the defendants named their names, and no one reported their disappearance.[15]

Victims in sequential order ˅

Name of the victim, date of death, place of burial

1 Khadra Muhammad al-Lami[16] December 21, 1919, House No. 38, Ali Bey al-Kabeer Alley.

2 Nazla Abu Al-Layl[17] January 4, 1920, House No. 38, Ali Bey Al-Kabeer Alley.

3 Aziza (surname unknown)[18] January 20, 1920, House No. 38, Ali Bey Al-Kabeer Alley.

4 Nabawiyyah (from Kom Bakir) [19] February 9, 1920, House No. 38, Ali Bey Al-Kabeer Alley.

5 Nabawiya Bint Juma[20] February 13, 1920, House No. 8, Quarter

Then a visually impaired man, Ahmed Morsi Abdo, submits a report to the constable that while he was digging inside his room to get water in and do some plumbing work, he was surprised to find human bones, so he continued digging until he found the rest of the corpse, which prompted him to report it immediately. By himself, he went to the man's house, which was not more than 50 meters away from the police station. The young lieutenant saw the corpse with his own eyes, and he became more excited to investigate and research the sensational case. In the end, he discovered that he was in front of a new surprise that the house was rented by a man named Muhammad Ahmed Al-Samni, and he used to rent out the rooms of the house for his own account. Among those who sub-let in the past period were Sakina Bint Ali and others, and that Sakina rented the room in which the man found the body under the tiles. The room with all methods and temptations, but the owner of the house refused, which prompted the officer to suspect Sakina because of that.