I traveled to Canada to attend the Montreal International Book Fair, leaving behind our venerable press busy with the killing of a Lebanese singer, but when I came back one week later I found it busy with the slaying of the daughter of a Moroccan singer.
Since I failed to understand the first crime due to the conflicting reports published by the press about it, I tried when I came back to understand the second one. I put all papers that have been published during my absence in front of me to pick up the threads so as not to be ignorant of what seemed the most important issue in the country.
I am fully aware of the US economic woes whose repercussions have spilled over into the rest of the world. I also know about the tragedy of the Gaza blockade that has been exacerbated recently, but I will definitely feel embarrassed if I attend an important gathering where the attendants discuss the murder of the daughter of a Moroccan singer and a girlfriend of hers in Sheikh Zayed City without understanding what they are talking about.
The prosecutor general helped me in the first murder when he issued the gag order which was a good opportunity for me to cover my ignorance of the case. Whenever someone asked me about the case I used to answer by saying that I am committed to the ban instead of confessing to having been unable to understand the conflicting reports of it. I used to tell everyone that the prosecutor general’s decision must be respected, but they would look at me suspiciously and walk away.
I wished that the gag order was also applied to the second murder due to the similarity between the two cases. Like the first one, the second crime involves the murder of a singer’s daughter. The common denominator is that an Arab singer is involved. Moreover, the tool used in both crimes is a knife, which the murderer had bought before the crime, the mystery surrounding the marital relations of the two victims is the same, as there was conflicting information about the husband of the victim in the first case and the fiancé of the slain daughter who turned out to be her husband.
But the prosecutor general let me down in the second crime, so I was forced to resort to the papers that were published during my absence to follow up on the details of the case. The press coverage of the second crime was actually great, and so I thanked God and the government for the press freedom we are enjoying, as it had enabled our press to put the reader out of his misery and keep him updated on the ins and outs of the crime.
They published, for example, that the crime was motivated by revenge not robbery, as the murderer had cut the tongue of one of the two victims and had not stolen anything from the house. The papers also said that the victim knows the killer because he didn’t break into the house. Drugs have been also reported to be a motive behind the crime and that the second victim was killed four hours after the first. It was also published that the victim phoned her fiancé/husband who lives in Heliopolis and that when he showed up two hours later he discovered the two murders despite the four-hour difference.
After collecting all this information and after feeling satisfied that I had finally understood a case that has preoccupied people for a while and that I can confidently talk about this case with anyone, I was surprised a few days ago that the murderer was arrested.
It turned out that the killer was motivated by robbery and that he didn’t know the victims. He had broken into the house through the kitchen window and had stolen a sum of money and a mobile phone. It also turned out that the crime had nothing to do with drugs and that the two crimes happened one right after the other.
Hence the killer did not cut any tongues, he had no motive to, whereas I developed a very strong motive to cut off all the tongues that wagged all this false information .
Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers’ Union and Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
