Maureen White, a social- work administrator from Devon, was charged with homicide, dangerous driving and using excessive speed after her rented 4WD vehicle collided with a coach carrying French tourists, eight of whom died.

Car rental is increasingly popular among visitors to Morocco and costs as little as £20 a day. But accidents occur with alarming frequency: 3,800 people died on the country’s roads last year, compared to 3,500 in Britain, where there are more than 10 times as many cars.

The Foreign Office stops short of advising people against driving in Morocco, but it does emphasise that it has a “poor road-safety record”. The FO said: “While it is up to people to make up their own minds, our advice is, hopefully, clear.”

Many UK travel operators offer fly-drive holidays to Morocco, including Cadogan Holidays, which said: “We do offer car rental. It’s a bit mad out there, though ... I wouldn’t want to drive there myself.”

Katie Bowman, features editor of The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, was seriously injured in a car crash near Marrakesh last September. “It was mayhem on the roads,” she recalls. “We were endlessly braking and swerving.”

Jeremy Hart, a motoring writer who drove the length of Morocco last year, says that many tourists struggle with the clash of driving styles: “The driving is much less orderly, there are less definite rules regarding rights of way, and the standard of vehicles on the road is much less high.”