Account of tortured teen sparks outcry

OULAD AYAD, Morocco — The mother of a 17-year-old Moroccan girl who told police she was gang-raped, forcibly tattooed and held against her will for two months recalled how her daughter was dumped at the family’s home by two men, the scars of horror stamped on her body, “her honor lost.”

The harrowing case in a nation where violence against women is widespread but largely ignored has sparked a public outcry, with people taking to social media to demand justice and a petition campaign invoking the teenager’s name: “We are all Khadija.”

The teen, whose story has dominated Moroccan media since an online video was posted last week showing her arms, legs and neck covered in crude tattoos and cigarette burns, told authorities she was released in mid-August after two months in captivity.

In an interview Wednesday with the Associated Press, her distraught mother said she fainted when she saw her daughter’s desecrated body and asked whether the girl would ever again be the daughter she knew.

“I was caught off guard when those criminals brought my daughter and I saw her in this condition. I fainted . . . I collapsed, seeing her like that, the tattoos, the burns, her honor lost,” the mother said, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect the family’s privacy and that of her daughter, who she referred to only by her first name, Khadija.