Rabat – The father of the 24-year-old Ifrane victim, an elderly widower and cancer patient, told Moroccan media in a video that his brutally murdered daughter, Fatima Rayhan, was the family’s breadwinner. Rayhan was a mother and a divorcee who lived at her parents’ house.
Following Rayhan’s death, her father entered a state of depression and called on King Mohammed VI and Moroccans to help him financially to raise his 7-year-old granddaughter and save his family from poverty.
Many Moroccans showed solidarity with the family on social media and offered to donate to the family. Some even offered to adopt and care for Rayhan’s daughter.
Locals in Oued Ifrane, a rural town in the Ifrane region in Morocco’s Middle Atlas Mountains, found Rayhan’s decapitated body in a deserted area on Friday, December 28.
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Two days later, police arrested a suspect in the murder, a 38-year-old shepherd who was on the run in a nearby forest until his arrest in Tounfite, a town in Midelt Province, Draa-Tafilalet, Morocco.
Rayhan’s father related that the shepherd had tried to force Rayhan into marrying him. When she repeatedly refused, the shepherd became vengeful, waited by her house until she went outside at 5 a.m., and then dragged her to an isolated area and killed her.
According to her father, Rayhan had already filed a complaint to the local gendarmerie about the shepherd’s threatening her. However, the shepherd apologized, and she withdrew the complaint.
The Ifrane murder came just 11 days after terrorists murdered two young Scandinavian women by decapitation near Imlil, 90 kilometers south of Marrakech.
