Raya and Sakina: The Alexandria Murders

The discovery in Alexandria

In November 1920, police in Alexandria's Labban district began uncovering human remains beneath the floors of rooms associated with sisters Raya and Sakina. The surviving judgment describes earlier reports of women disappearing in the neighborhood and the discovery of bodies in several premises connected to the defendants.

Seventeen women were ultimately linked to the murder case. Modern historian Elena Chiti, working from contemporary press and the investigation record, notes that police arrested Raya and Sakina, their husbands and other suspects and charged them in connection with the killings.

What the court established

The Alexandria criminal court's judgment treated robbery as the central motive. According to the case record, women were drawn to premises operated by the group, killed, stripped of jewelry and buried beneath floors. The judgment assigned criminal responsibility to a group rather than to the sisters alone.

That distinction matters because later popular retellings often reduce the case to two women acting by themselves. The 1921 court instead sentenced six defendants to death: Raya and Sakina, their husbands Hasab Allah Sa'id and Muhammad Abd al-'Al, and Orabi Hassan and Abd al-Raziq Yusuf. A jeweler accused of handling property connected to the victims received five years, while three other defendants were acquitted.

The May 1921 verdict

On May 16, 1921, the Alexandria court issued its final judgment. Historical scholarship and the reproduced judgment agree that the six principal defendants received death sentences. Chiti's academic study emphasizes that Raya and Sakina became the focus of extraordinary press attention because they were the first women sentenced to death in Egypt's secular justice system.

The six condemned defendants were executed later in 1921. The case rapidly entered Egyptian popular culture and remained one of the country's most famous crime stories.

Separating record from legend

The crime became a vehicle for sensational stories about gender, sexuality, class and urban disorder. Chiti's research shows that the public image of Raya and Sakina was constructed through press coverage and later cultural memory, not simply copied from the evidentiary record.

Crime by Region therefore does not repeat claims that conflict with the surviving case file merely because they became common in films, plays or television adaptations. The defensible core is narrower: 17 women were killed; six defendants were convicted of the murders and sentenced to death; one additional defendant received a prison term; and three were acquitted.

The victims

The victims were women living in or moving through a precarious urban environment. Contemporary authorities and later media often described them through stigmatizing labels connected to poverty and prostitution. Those labels are not necessary to understand why they were targeted or why the murders mattered. This archive avoids using them as a substitute for the victims' identities and humanity.

Timeline

Current status

The case is Solved / Adjudicated. The 1921 judgment established criminal responsibility and imposed final sentences on the principal defendants. Modern scholarship continues to reassess how press coverage and popular culture shaped the story, but that historiographical debate does not undo the historical convictions.