EDITOR’S NOTE — Maureen Dabbagh encounters roadblocks in her quest to recover her daughter, snatched away by her husband and taken to the Middle East. Second of a four-part series.
By Todd Lewan
The Associated Press
Child recovery in the Middle East, Maureen Dabbagh came to learn, was no tidy business.
To pull off a snatchback, you had to have friends in high, and low, places. You had to have escape routes. You had to keep cops and border guards sweet. It helped to be good with a gun.
And patience — you needed lots of that.
Maureen had been patient. More than two years had passed since Nadia had vanished; more than a year had gone by since Maureen had turned to a shadowy lawyer, Mitch Rogovin, and his clandestine agents to get back her daughter.
She’d trained to recover children — hers and others — who had been spirited overseas. She’d learned the escape routes, made contacts in official circles and along border crossings, figured out what it took — gold, favors, violence — to recapture a child.
Maureen Dabbagh’s quest to regain her daughter was epic; in fact, a State Department memo would refer to it, caustically, as a “Never-Ending Story.”
Diaries, court papers, hospital records, foreign and U.S. immigration records, Interpol cables, State Department, FBI memos, and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act corroborate aspects of her story.
Most of it comes from Dabbagh, herself — and from others she encountered along the way, like Colleen Piper, another mother whose abducted daughter had been snatched out of Syria.
One day, frustrated by the lack of progress on her child’s case, Maureen vented to Piper on the phone. Piper listened, intently, then told Maureen how she’d gone to Damascus herself to take charge of her daughter’s recovery — despite Rogovin’s best efforts.
“Trust yourself,” Piper said. “Don’t put all of your hope in Rogovin’s boys.”
Maureen assumed that Hisham was in Saudi Arabia — he’d always said he was afraid to go to Syria, and he had relatives in the capital of Riyadh. And she assumed that he was working, as usual, as a lab technician.
“Maybe I can help,” Piper said.
She contacted a lawyer she knew in Riyadh, and he faxed along a list of medical centers and hospitals there.
Maureen called Security Forces Hospital, identifying herself as an American nurse. “We have a Saudi patient here, but I can’t read his chart. The lab work was done at your hospital. I can only make out the name of the tech that signed off. I need to talk to him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Dabbagh,” she said.
“One minute.” A pause. “He just completed his shift and went home.”
Bingo.
Maureen phoned Jim Prietsch, the Interpol special agent in Washington. He sighed.
“We still can’t touch him, Maureen.”
Saudi Arabia, like most countries in the Middle East, did not extradite fugitives wanted for international child abduction, he explained.
Maureen had found Hisham; now she needed to devise a way to arrange his arrest.
___
The next afternoon, Maureen was standing in the office of Mohammed Al-Ghambi, first consul of the Saudi embassy in Washington.
She had passed through security by suggesting that she and the consul had met recently at a cocktail party. Now Ghambi was searching her face for any clue to why he should remember her.
“Hello! How is your family?” He extended his hand. “Please, please, dear madam, do sit down.”
Maureen smiled big and friendly.
“So,” the consul said, “what do I owe the pleasure?”
His fingers held a generic cigarette, burned almost to the filter. His eyes darted between Maureen and the soccer game on a small TV.
“I’d like a visa to enter Saudi Arabia,” she said.
“And why is that?”
She explained that her ex-husband, a Syrian national, had abducted their daughter in Florida and taken the child to Saudi Arabia using a phony Syrian passport.
The consul’s smile evaporated.
“I can’t help you.”
She handed him a U.S. warrant for Hisham’s arrest, Nadia’s birth certificate, an order from an Ohio court granting her full custody of the child. He didn’t look at the papers.
“I still can’t help you.”
Maureen handed him a copy of an outstanding Syrian warrant for Hisham’s arrest. The warrant made him ineligible for a work permit in the kingdom, and his immigration status invalid.
She then produced a copy of Hisham’s civil registration record from Damascus. It stated that he was single with no children. Nadia, an American citizen, had entered Saudi Arabia with a Syrian passport. How did she get one, if her father hadn’t registered her as his child in Syria?
The consul cleared his throat, picked up the phone, made an international call. A conversation ensued, in Arabic. When he hung up, he glared at her.
“Go home, madam,” he said. “I’ll call you in a few days.”
True to his word, the consul did phone Maureen several days later. Offering no details, he informed her that Hisham and Nadia would soon be departing the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
___
On Oct. 22, 1995, at 4 in the morning, the telephone awakened her.
The caller was Mounir Al-Amoudi, the lawyer in Syria who had pulled strings to have a warrant issued for Hisham’s arrest all those months before. He had big news: Hisham had just been arrested at the Damascus airport.
Months of communications to U.S. officials in Riyadh, to the FBI in Florida, to her lawyer in Damascus, to the State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues in Washington _ was it all about to pay off? Maureen packed a bag, remembering her daughter’s favorite possession, a pink blanket with a Kool-Aid stain. She grabbed the first flight out of Dulles that evening.
Her flight touched down in Damascus at 5 p.m. the following day. As soon as she cleared customs, Maureen phoned her lawyer.
“Where is Nadia?”
Without pause, Amoudi told her that Hisham had been taken into custody, but that the child had been handed over to his relatives and had disappeared.
Days later, there was a hearing on Hisham’s case. Ramadan was approaching, however, so the judge delayed the trial until after the holy month.
Amoudi told Maureen to go home. He reminded her that Hisham was a Sunni Muslim man who had been arrested on her account — on account of a Western, Christian woman. It would likely sink their case if she turned up at the Islamic court, he said.
And so, five days after arriving in Damascus, Maureen boarded a plane back to America, Nadia’s blanket still in her bag.
___
Three months later she was back in Damascus, sitting in a rental car with a fellow who used to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, peering intently across the road at a flower shop.
“Is that him?”
“I don’t know,” Maureen said. She squinted. “I still can’t make him.”
They were looking for the owner of the shop, Ahmed Medanni — Nadia’s uncle. Maureen had sources in the Syrian capital who said Nadia was living in Damascus with Medanni and her aunt, Hisham’s sister. If they shadowed him, he might lead them to Nadia.
The CIA guy was impatient, uncertain Medanni was there, unwilling to wait for him to leave. Suddenly, he threw open the car door, got out and crossed the Mezzeh Autostrade with a languid grace, stopping in front of a sign in a display window that read, GARDENIA.
Then he ducked inside.
Idiot, Maureen thought. What if Medanni gets suspicious? Why couldn’t you just sit still for a while? After a few moments, the agent came out.
“You SOB,” she snapped.
“He’s in there.”
“I’m going to go see.”
She couldn’t enter the shop; she’d be recognized. She glanced through the window. A man behind the counter was chatting with someone. She strolled past the display window once, then again, and again, then hurried back to the car.
“It’s him, all right.”
To kill time, the agent told Maureen about a job he had just wrapped up elsewhere in the Middle East. Snatched four toddlers. Had the mother talk the ex-husband into allowing her to take the kids on a picnic, on a workday. As soon as Daddy went to work, Momma and kiddies slipped away and met him at a predetermined parking lot.
The next thing they knew, they were racing across the desert in an all-terrain vehicle, zipping off the crests of sand dunes. By sundown, they had made a border checkpoint.
Maureen said nothing.
Then her partner began describing a job waiting for him in Egypt _ the extraction of a 3-year-old American girl, taken to Cairo by her mother. One recovery team had already tried to smuggle the kid out on an old barge. They had gone through tens of thousands of dollars laying the groundwork, when something unexpected happened.
“What?”
“The mother died,” the agent said.
Now he was being paid to finish the job. He’d been to Egypt four times to scout it out. “I know where she is,” he said. “I have access to her.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I can’t get her out.”
They waited a while longer. We’ve probably spooked him, Maureen was thinking. He must have noticed that we’ve been following him for five days. Once, when Medanni had realized he was being tailed, he drove aimlessly, looping around and around city blocks.
Finally, the agent walked straight into the shop and asked for Medanni. But he’d already given them the slip, probably out a back door.
Another opportunity wasted.
They decided to leave Syria that night.
Waiting for their flight, the agent brought up his Egypt case again. Maureen didn’t want to hear it. At least you know where that child is, she thought. Nadia’s still out there, somewhere.
Offhandedly, she said, “It ought to be easy to get that kid out of Egypt.”
The agent leaned forward.
“Think so?”
Locating the target wasn’t the toughest part of a recovery. Transporting a kid across borders without papers _ now, that required some expertise.
To finish the job, somebody would have to play the child’s mother. Somebody fearless.
Somebody like her.
___
TO BE CONTINUED.