The Case of the Phantom Journalist and the Two Teacups: A Cairo Murder Mystery Solved by a Wedding Ring

A badly decomposed body was discovered inside a Cairo apartment, triggering a complicated investigation to determine both the victim’s identity and the killer. Police at first believed the tenant, who rented the flat under the name “Kamal Lotfy, the journalist,” might be a witness — but soon uncovered that this identity was fake. As detectives dug deeper, they matched a wedding ring from the corpse to a missing person report from Alexandria and identified the victim as Hany, a driver. The so-called journalist was revealed to be Mahmoud, a seasoned con artist. He eventually confessed that he had lured Hany to the apartment and murdered him to steal what he thought was a large sum of cash, only to discover afterward that the money was far less than he had expected.