When he acceded to the throne in 1961, Hassan II maintained the tradition of the harem in the royal palace in Rabat. The then young monarch had just married the Berber princess, mother of the current king. He had had to break off an intense love relationship with a French actress who left her film career to follow him to Morocco without being able to enter royalty. Another woman is now fighting a legal battle to try to prove that, several years earlier, the then crown prince Hassan had a romantic relationship with her mother in Casablanca, from whom she was born. Jane Benzaquen, 72, has judicially demanded samples of her DNA from the Mount Sinai hospital in New York, prior to , in order to prove her affiliation with the Alawite dynasty.
The retired hotel receptionist Benzaquen had the “revelation of recognizing her own face”—precisely in July 1999, during the , and that the images of Hassan II were those of her true father. The memories of his maternal grandmother were decisive. He told her that, around 1951, a luxurious Mercedes came to pick up his mother at home in a neighborhood of Casablanca. She almost always deposited bags with food and gifts before taking them to the supposed love encounters with the prince. The young woman, a clerk in a fashion clothing store, became pregnant and Jane was born in 1953. She had to leave Morocco with her baby.
The little girl arrived at just 10 months old in Belgium, where her mother immediately married a Belgian man, Raoul Jossart, who recognized her as his daughter. His maternal Jewish religion later opened the door for him to emigrate to Israel at the age of 18, and he settled in the tourist city of Eilat, on the Red Sea coast. After the death of Hasan II, he initiated a process of recognition of paternity and financial compensation before the Israeli justice system that was unsuccessful, according to a 2008 ruling. The cost exceeds 5,000 million euros, according to estimates by the magazine Forbes.
The alleged half-sister of Mohamed VI then appealed to the Belgian courts. To assert her right, she hired lawyer Marc Uyttendaele, who had handled the case of the Belgian sculptor in a filiation claim. Boël. As a first measure, a DNA test served to confirm that Raoul Jossart was not her father, even though he recognized her as his daughter. A second test established a clear genetic origin from the Maghreb and Middle East area, and not from European lineage.
The Alawite royal family has refused to collaborate in the paternity test attributed to Hassan II. In Morocco there is no legal requirement, as in Europe. The reform of the Mudawana or Family Code – presented more than a year ago to King Mohamed VI and the Government, and still pending to be sent to Parliament – will also not allow the biological parent to claim the paternal surname or the right to food and inheritance. The Council of Ulema, the highest religious authority consulted by the monarch in his capacity as commander of believers, settled the issue by decreeing that they are “contrary to Sharia (Islamic law).”
Genetic analysis
In view of the legal blockade, the Belgian-Israeli woman’s lawyer relocated the process to the United States at the end of last year. In an unexpected turn, he requested a federal court in New York to require the Mount Sinai hospital to hand over medical data it held on Hassan II that could be used for a valid DNA analysis before Belgian justice. US data protection legislation, however, reportedly protects the confidentiality of medical reports, which cannot be made public without the consent of the patient or, where appropriate, their family.
The Moroccan royal family – which has already denounced through criminal proceedings an attempted fraud and extortion by Bezanquen – has reacted. Through his lawyers, he has commissioned a forensic report from British experts in image analysis for judicial proceedings to establish whether there is a physical resemblance between the woman and Hassan II. The report from the company RSI Forsenics, the content of which has now been published by The Independent, concludes that the observed similarities are “compatible with a casual resemblance between unrelated individuals in comparable population settings” and “offer limited support for the existence of a biological relationship.” Bezanquen’s lawyers consider that this is a maneuver to try to delay DNA analyzes in Belgium. In successive stories, this septuagenarian woman with a Moroccan mother and still unknown father often repeats: “I was paralyzed by anguish. My past was a Pandora’s box that I did not want to open.”
