Rabat - A Moroccan man was detained for 24 hours following an altercation with the daughter of the President of the House of Councilors, Hakim Benchamach.
Rabat – A Moroccan man was detained for 24 hours following an altercation with the daughter of the President of the House of Councilors, Hakim Benchamach.
The man, a Belgium-Moroccan named Soufiane, has accused the woman of assaulting her without cause and using her father’s position to have him arrested, while the woman, in her early 20s, claimed the man had brutally attacked her in a fit of road rage.
The exact details of the fight have not yet been established, as the two sides gave conflicting accounts to different media outlets.
The man told the daily Assabah that incident began after he passed Benchamach’s daughter vehicle on the highway from Marrakech to Casablanca. Once in he arrived in Casablanca, he said, he stopped his car at a traffic light and found the woman throwing bottles at his car and screaming at his face.
When he got out of the car to calm her, he said she attacked him, scratching his face, before car drivers intervened and separated them.
The man, who was accompanied with his Belgian wife and baby, added that the woman began threatening him and swearing at him. Dismissing her as someone suffering from psychological problems, he left the scene, only to find himself dragged from his hotel room two hours later to the Casablanca police district by 10 police officers, who he accused of mistreatment.
He said he was detained for 24 hours, during which the police interrogated him and accused him of physically assaulting the woman, which he denied.
The Moroccan expat said the police could have simply taken his passport instead of putting in detention. He added that his wife and child spent the night alone in the hotel, not knowing what to do.
The President of the House of Councilors’ daughter, in an interview with the news website Al Aoual, gave a different account of what happened. She said the man had been dangerously passing other cars on the highway and in Casablanca when he nearly get into collision with her and another car.
When she lowered her car window to ask him to watch out, she said, the man threw a lighter at her, hitting her in the eye.
At that point, she responded by throwing a bottle at him.
They both got out of the car, and he started shouting and beating her up.
“You hit me in front of my wife,” he said in French, according to the woman. “I’ll show you how to hit me in front of my wife.”
The girl added that he tore up her clothes and slapped her in the face several times.
After the incident, she went to file a complaint against him.
She added she did not want to tell her father what happened until her called to enquire why she was late, finding her in hospital.
She said that she could not sleep for three days, and that would not forgive the man in question, who she insisted should be punished so that he does not assault other people in the future.
