caption,
Martine Vik Magnussen’s body was found in 2008
Item Information
- Author, Nawal AlMaghafi
- Rolle, From BBC News Arabic
1 hour ago
The son of a billionaire who fled to Yemen hours after the death of a student in London 15 years ago has admitted to BBC News that he was involved in her murder.
The body of 23yearold Martine Vik Magnussen was discovered in a basement on Great Portland Street in central London in 2008. Since then her family has been fighting for justice.
Farouk Abdulhak, who is on the Metropolitan Police’s most wanted list, is the subject of an international arrest warrant. He had never spoken about the case.
Now he told the BBC that Vik Magnussen had died as a result of a “sexual accident gone awry”. But Abdulhak, who studied under Vik Magnussen, said he was not ready to return to the UK and make a confession to the police because it would be “too late” for that.
Check out the following story:
I was a student when Martine’s body was discovered and I found the news of the case extremely shocking given that the prime suspect in the murder was a Yemeni I am from Yemen myself.
When I became a BBC journalist in 2011, this was one of the first stories I got involved with. My main goal was to find answers for Martine’s family, who see her death as a test of international law. The UK does not have an extradition treaty with Yemen.
But it was only last year that I came into contact with Farouk Abdulhak. My communication with him began through social networks. Hundreds of journalists have tried to reach him over the years and Abdulhak has ignored them all. But our common background as Yemenis helped me gain his trust.
Ten days after we began talking, he sent me the first in a series of revealing messages.
“I made one when I was younger, it was a mistake,” he wrote.
In the thousands of text and voice messages he sent me over the course of five months, he never once mentioned Martine’s name in relation to her death. He preferred terms like “the incident” or “the accident”.
But the police report made clear how violent the Norwegian student’s death was, as a result of “compression to the neck” that “could mean she was strangled, immobilized or suffocated”.
Her body had 43 cuts and scrapes, “many typical injuries from attacks or fights.”
caption,
Journalist Nawal AlMaghafi is on the phone with Farouk Abdulhak
Farouk and Martine studied at Regent’s Business School in London. And Martine wanted to work in the financial market in the British capital.
The last time the friends saw Martine alive was in the early hours of March 14, 2008 at Maddox nightclub in Mayfair (central London) where she and Farouk were celebrating the end of their exams.
Friends say Farouk offered to take her to his flat after the party on Great Portland Street in central London. They were too tired to continue the party but said Martine wanted to go. Surveillance cameras show the young woman leaving the club with Farouk at 2:59 a.m.
There are no witnesses to what happened afterwards.
By the time the sun came up, Martine was already dead and her body would not be discovered until 48 hours later. Farouk had already fled Britain for Cairo, Egypt. There he took his father’s private plane and flew to Yemen. Farouk’s lawyer said at the time that he was innocent and did not kill Martine.
Farouk is not just any Yemeni. Raised between the United States and Egypt, he is the son of Shaher Abdulhak, one of the richest and most powerful men in Yemen. Shaher owned an empire of sugar, soda, oil and guns. And he was a close friend of Ali Abdullah Saleh, the then President of Yemen.
When I first tried to reach Farouk in 2011, I spent months in Yemen looking for him. But I had to leave when the authorities warned me that I had to drop the story.
In February 2022, I decided to reinvestigate the case from London. Farouk’s father had died and Saleh was no longer president. I wondered if it would be possible to persuade Farouk to speak now.
But I also knew it wasn’t going to be easy. When a friend got his number, I sent several messages through different apps but got no reply. Until a friend noticed that Farouk was using Snapchat.
caption,
Nawal has tried to contact Farouk for years
I sent a message and he replied within seconds. His first question was where am I from. I named him after the affluent Yemeni neighborhood I grew up in, assuming he probably lived there as well. I was right. His interest was piqued immediately.
Now that I’d struck up a conversation with Farouk, it was a question of gaining his trust, not least because I’ve never hidden my profession in the first exchange I told him I was a journalist.
Our first conversations were simply about our similar experiences. Despite the fact that he was incredibly rich, in a way we had a lot in common. We exchanged stories about the ski season in the same Swiss resorts, about learning at international schools and about the places we loved to visit in London.
And then he started to open up.
“I did something when I was younger, it was a mistake…” he wrote. “I told you my real name, I can’t go to the UK specifically because something happened there,” he wrote.
“The only reason I’m scared is because you told me you’re a writer and a journalist. You’re the last person I should be talking to.”
The speed with which he opened up to me might seem surprising, but you have to keep in mind that Farouk is incredibly isolated. His entire family lives outside of Yemen including his now exwife and daughter. They fled the country’s devastating civil war. But he doesn’t dare to visit her for fear of being arrested.
None of Farouk’s friends I spoke to during my investigation had heard from him since he fled although they all said they were shocked to learn of Martine’s death at the time.
Now that Farouk seemed ready to share more, I made it clear that I work for the BBC and that I wanted to make a story about his story.
Surprisingly, that didn’t stop him from talking.
So I asked him to address a previous exchange in which he spoke of having “great regrets.” He answered:
“1: I’m very sorry for the unfortunate accident that happened. 2: I’m sorry to come here [para o Iêmen]. I should have stayed and paid the price.”
At the same time, I also interviewed other people involved in the case, including Martine’s father and close friends. This made the investigation one of the most difficult I have ever worked on. As I spoke to those whose lives were being shattered by Martine’s death, desperate for answers, my phone kept ringing with messages from Farouk.
Nina Brantzeg and Cecilie Dahl, friends of Martine, were with her at the Maddox nightclub the night she died. Cecilie had seen Farouk with Martine before and says they are friends. But that night he looked different, she says. Farouk was reportedly upset when one of the friends took a picture of him and Martine, although Martine didn’t seem to notice anything unusual.
Another friend of Martine’s, Thale Lassen, says he thinks Farouk tried to kiss Martine once and she told him she wasn’t interested. In fact, says Thale, Martine used to live in Farouk’s apartment because it was so centrally located. Surveillance footage shows them arm in arm with Farouk as they leave the club.
When Martine didn’t come home the next day, her friends reported her missing. But they say it wasn’t until someone noticed Farouk had deleted his Facebook account that police took the matter seriously. They searched Farouk’s apartment and quickly found Martine’s halfnaked body in the basement of her building.
By that time he had fled Britain. Police knew Farouk had taken a commercial flight from London to Cairo but had no detailed knowledge of his escape.
I was able to locate one of Farouk’s father’s closest friends in London, a man I call Samir. He told me that in the early hours of March 14 he received a call from Farouk asking for money that they needed it urgently back in Cairo and that his credit cards were not working.
Samir says Farouk passed out on the sofa when he got the money. He had to throw ice water on the young man’s face to wake him up.
“It was like he took something,” Samir said.
He says Farouk bought a ticket for the next flight to Cairo. And we know that his father transported him from there to Yemen a place Farouk had never lived before but from where it would be impossible to extradite him.
I spoke further about this with another friend of Farouk’s father Jordanian businessman Abdulhay Al Mejali.
“Farouk wanted to go to England, sit in court and defend himself,” he said. “But the father advised him not to interfere [e] stay in Yemen.”
Jessica Wadsworth, the then chief of the Metropolitan Police who handled the case, admits it was disappointing when they found out where Farouk had gone.
“Because you missed the chance. I’ve never had a murder investigation…where…you find out in three or four days that your suspect is…unreachable,” she says.
caption,
Photo of Farouk Abdulhak at his father’s funeral
Police met Martine’s family when their flight from Norway landed in England
Her father, Odd Petter Magnussen, told me of his despair.
“As a father, this is the hardest time of my life. Very close, almost physically, to being ripped apart.”
Desperate for justice, Odd Petter wrote to Queen Elizabeth in 2010, who referred the murder case to thenMayor of London Boris Johnson. Petter received several pledges from the UK government that they would help solve the case. I have stayed in regular contact with him for the past 12 years and have always promised to try to get answers about what happened to his daughter.
Now I finally had the opportunity to hear Farouk’s account of that night. A month after we started texting each other, I finally started getting the truth out directly.
Nawal: “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
Farouk: “I don’t know what happened, it’s all a blur.”
Farouk: “I have flashbacks from time to time.”
Farouk: “When I smell a certain female perfume, I feel uncomfortable.”
I finally got on the phone with him. I asked if he would be returning to the UK to deal with the aftermath of Martine’s death.
“I don’t think justice will be done,” he told me. “I think the criminal justice system there [no Reino Unido] is heavily biased. I think they’re going to want to make an example of me being the son of an Arab when… the son of someone who’s rich… it’s too late,” he said.
I traveled to Yemen to try and meet Farouk in person. But when I got there he told me he would only meet me at his place a risk I didn’t want to take.
I said Martine’s father was dying to know what happened. “As a man, as a human being, as someone with morals, I think someone should do that,” Farouk said in a phone call. But then he added: “Some things are better left unsaid. The truth is I don’t remember what happened, there’s nothing to say.”
“Sexual Accident”
Back in London I tried again to get the truth out and wrote that I always want to know what happened.
Then he replied: “It was just an accident. Nothing shameful. Just a sexual accident gone wrong.”
“Nobody knows what happened because I could hardly understand what happened myself.”
When I asked why, he answered with just one word: “cocaine”.
I asked him if he had already spoken to a lawyer in the UK. he said yes
“Trust me I’m legal (expletive),” he wrote. “(Due to) leaving the country and the body was removed.”
I asked why he took the body away.
“I don’t remember,” he replied.
I asked him if he had considered turning himself in and he said his lawyers had advised him not to because he was now “serving the heaviest sentence”.
During our conversations, I asked him several times for a formal interview, but he declined.
It was time to tell Martine’s father about my conversations with Farouk.
Odd Petter found it very difficult to hear the phone calls. It was the first time he heard the voice of the man suspected of killing his daughter.
“He obviously has no sympathy for our family and he doesn’t show any remorse or anything,” he said.
But he said the new channel of communication with Farouk made him hopeful that progress could now be made.
“I’m optimistic that we can have a longterm solution… because we can talk to him. I am more convinced than ever that there will be a solution to this case. I just hope it’s within… my ethical standards.”
I asked what he wanted to say to Farouk.
“Go back to Britain. Tell us what happened to Martine. Because not only Martine deserves that, but also our family,” he said.
“The only right thing would be for us, but also for you, to close this case somehow.”
The Metropolitan Police responded that Farouk Abdulhak was “quickly identified as the sole suspect in her rape and murder”.
“We continue to do everything in our power to bring him back to the UK for trial.”