Moroccan hometown embarrassed by 'Rubygate'

FKIH BENSALAH, Morocco — Karima El Mahroug, the young woman who could be the downfall of Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is grabbing headlines in Morocco, much to the embarrassment of her home town.In Fkik Bensalah, where the woman now known as 'Ruby the Heart Stealer' grew up until the age of 11, people are unhappy to find themselves in the spotlight over a steamy sex scandal involving prostitution and minors."Most people living in Fkih Bensalah are reluctant to talk about this because this is a conservative farming area," explains Abdelkader Heddioui, president of the local section of the Moroccan Association for Human Rights."People don't want to talk about this affair because it involves a daughter of the country implicated in prostitution," agreed another rights activist, Ahmed Karkori.In the deprived neighbourhood of Kouassem, where Ruby was born on November 1 1992, according to her birth certificate, several neighbours still remember the girl with whom Berlusconi is alleged to have had paid sex while she was a minor. The trial begins on Wednesday.Moroccan newspapers have widely picked up on a report in the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano, which claimed that two mysterious Italians offered an employee in the local municipality a large sum of money to alter the date on the birth certificate to 1990.The paper said the attempt was intended to prove that Ruby was no longer a minor when she allegedly had sex with Berlusconi in February 2010. Prostitution is only a crime in Italy when it involves minors.Meanwhile neighbours remember Ruby as "already a young woman at 15.""She visited two years ago but didn't stay here long, only a week or 10 days. She stayed with her grandfather," who still lives here, a young woman in Kouassem, who requested anonymity, told AFP."I recognised her when I saw her photo in a newspaper. I remember she didn't go out very much and didn't talk to anybody. She must have been 15 or 16 but was already a young woman and attracted lots of looks," she added.Fkih Bensalah, w

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