Selected Detective
THE HANNAH SCHLEGEL CASE

Although it had been fifteen years, Khalifa remembered the Schlegel case as if it had just happened yesterday. The woman's body was found by local resident, Muhammad Ibrahim Jamal, in the Conshu Plateau, a dark, gloomy, and rarely visited building, in the southwest corner of the Karnak Temple complex. Sixty-year-old Israeli citizen of Jewish descent, single, according to the autopsy report suffered a series of severe blows to his head and face caused by a blunt object of undetermined type.

Like the cracks in his jawbone and skull in three different places, the murder weapon has also left marks on his skin of the ankh symbol criss-crossed with small rose-shaped markings, perhaps some sort of decorative design on the surface of the weapon.

Despite the serious injuries to her body, Jamal was convinced that Schlegel was still alive when he found her. In a state of blood and not fully conscious, he whispered two words - Thoth and Tzfardeah - repeating it for several times before falling into a coma and not waking up again since. There were no other witnesses to corroborate his statement and no witnesses at all to the murder itself, except the old temple guard who claimed to hear screams from inside the temple and briefly saw someone rush away from the scene, staggered with “something on his head, like a cute little bird!” Since the man was old and half blind, also having a reputation of being often drunk at work, none of them took the evidence seriously.

Luxor's then police chief, Inspector Ehab Ali Mahfudz, has taken control of the case, assisted by his deputy Inspector Abdul Ibn-husani. Khalifa, who had just been stationed in Luxor from her native Giza, was also assigned as a team of investigators. He was 24 at the time, and this is

the first murder case for him.

From this, the investigation has focused on two of the most likely motives behind the killings. The first one that seems obvious, supported also by mahfudz, is robbery, because the victim's wallet and watch are missing. The second, a slim possibility option though not to be taken for granted, is that this is a form of fundamentalist attack.just a month before, it was, nine Israelis were shot dead in a tour bus on the freeway between Cairo and Ismailiya.

Khalifa, who has the least experience as well as the youngest team member, had doubts in both scenarios from the start. If robbery was the motive, why didn't the perpetrator pick up a gold Star David hanging from a necklace around the victim's neck? And if fundamentalist attacks, why don't they claim recognition for their actions, as is commonly done after attacks like this? There is an aspect of the puzzle that still continues in this case.

Actually, he had made one phone call from his room, on the night of his arrival the hotel housekeeper overheard him as he delivered towels and soap. And a large kitchen knife had been found in a handbag next to his body, just sharpened, as if he was preparing to commit violence against someone, or otherwise another reason to defend himself in the face of violence from others.

The deeper Khalifa thinks about the case, the more he is convinced that this has nothing to do with theft and extremism. The key, he felt sure, was a phone call. Who has Schlegel spoken to? What'd he say? He had requested a print of the phone call from the hotel, but coincidentally his meter had chosen that afternoon as the perfect time to break down, and before he had time to pursue the Egyptian Telecommunications office to obtain details of phone calls for the entire building, the investigation had received an unexpected result: a Schlegel watch was found in the home of Muhammad Jamal.

Jamal is widely known by the Luxor Police Station. As a small-time criminal who has become ingrained, he has a series of legal charges along your sleeve, including, they range from the attacks and punches that have kept him in Al-Awdi Al-Jadid custody for three years to the theft of cars and marijuana supplies (six months in Abu zaabal). At the time of the murder, he was working as an unlicensed tour guide, and claimed to have been clean for several years, a claim that was always ignored and ignored by Chief Mahfudz.

“Once a villain, forever a villain,” he said. “A leopard will not change the spots on his body, and a litter like Jamal will not turn into an angel in just a night.” Khalifa was present at the interrogation of Jamal. An unpleasant activity. Brutal mahfuz and hasani lashed a blind blow at the suspect. First, he rejected everything about the clock. After twenty minutes of being beaten and beaten, he fell to his knees and confessed that, yes, he had taken the clock without a second thought. He has debts, and his family will be evicted from their home, his daughter is sick. However, he vehemently rejected the allegations of having killed Schlegel or taken his wallet, and remained so in two days of increasingly harsh checks to treat him. As the interrogation session ended, he was urinating blood and his eyes were so bruised that he could barely see anyone. He continued to declare his innocence.

Khalifa has digested all of this, regretting being there too afraid to speak, fearing that if she does so it could in some way jeopardize her police career. What made matters worse was that from the start he was so sure Jamal had told the truth. There was something in his outrageous rage, which made him scream to say he did not kill the woman, in his refusal to surrender even under the pounding of Hasani's fist, which so convinced Khalifa that he was, he was, as he admitted, he found Schlegel after the woman was attacked. This man could be a thief, but he was definitely not a murderer! Mahfudz, however, remained unmoved. And Khalifa said nothing. Not during the interrogation, not also when Jamal was sent to court, not also when he was charged twenty-five years of forced labor in the Tura excavation, not even when he was sent to court, not even four months after his execution he took his own life, hanging himself by a cable on a crossbar in his cell.

In the years that followed Khalifa tried to justify for himself this silence, defending himself that Jamal was a vile lawbreaker and ingrained, fair or not, maybe no less than he deserves. However, the truth is that his cowardice has led an innocent man to be charged with a crime he did not commit, and left a woman to die without a real killer on the run. And now, his cowardice has come back to haunt him. Deep in his mind, he always knew this would happen.