It was a bone-chilling discovery on a warm July night: a young woman’s body folded into a suitcase abandoned in a parking lot at London’s Heathrow airport.
Now, 11 years after 28-year-old Montrealer Fatima Kama’s body was found, one of the most perplexing killings of a Canadian overseas has moved a step closer to resolution with Scotland Yard’s arrest of a Lebanese man who was in hiding for a decade in the Middle East.
The trail led from Kama’s modest Marble Arch flat to London’s high-rolling clubs and casinos, to turbulent south Lebanon, and the wealthy Gulf state of Bahrain. And for years it went nowhere, with suspects detained and released, clues fumbled and a “smoking gun” CCTV clip retrieved only months after her death.
On Tuesday, London’s Metropolitan Police charged 41-year-old Youssef Ahmed Wahid, a former flight attendant, and briefly a flatmate of Kama, with murder. An autopsy showed that she had been stabbed many times in what police had called a “frenzied or panicked attack.”
Ahmed, who denied any involvement with the killing, was arrested in Bahrain last month, before being transferred to Britain.
Earlier, he was arrested several times but had been released because of lack of evidence. He was released in Lebanon, where he had travelled after Kama’s death, settling in his family home in the southern town of Ramadiyeh, which was attacked as a Hezbollah stronghold during the 2006 war with Israel.
With new information from the London police, a Lebanese court sentenced Wahid to death in absentia. Instead, he fled to Bahrain.
It was one more twist in Fatima Kama’s story, which began with eager anticipation and ended in tragedy.
Born and raised in Morocco in a middle class family — her father, Bouchaib Kama is a noted chef — Fatima emigrated to Montreal at 20, shelved her girlhood ambition to be a singer, and studied accounting at a community college.
But her hopes were rebooted when her aunt’s Lebanese husband encouraged her to come to London and launch a performing career. She arrived in May 1999, moving into a one-bedroom flat in an Arab-populated area in the centre of the city.
Her landlord was Wahid’s brother Adel, a 24-year-old driver who worked for wealthy Arab visitors. And while Kama’s dream of recording an album failed to come true, the petite, blonde woman was soon circulating with high-flying Middle Eastern men who took rooms in some of London’s most fashionable hotels.
But all was not well, and Kama missed her family. When she returned to Montreal for a birthday celebration in July 1999, she told her mother she was coming home soon.
She was never to leave London alive.
While Kama was in Montreal, Youssef Wahid moved into the flat that she had rented earlier from his brother. On her return she shared the apartment, but according to an investigation by CBC’s Fifth Estate, spent much of her time with a well-to-do man from Dubai as she prepared to leave London.
On June 16, 1999, she took about $80,000 worth of money and jewelry from a safety deposit box, telling her mother by phone that she had earned it as a singer. Next day, a first class plane ticket to Montreal was ordered for her from the Dorchester Hotel.
But the ticket was never collected, and on the evening of June 17, a video surveillance camera spotted Wahid buying a train ticket to Heathrow airport. He was later seen in Paddington station pushing a large suitcase on a trolley, and surveillance cameras followed his movements to the multi-storey parking lot in Terminal Three, where a staffer found the luggage containing Kama’s body.
On July 18, the day after Kama’s death, video footage showed Wahid’s brother Adel driving him to another Heathrow car park, along with their mother, and Youssef was seen walking through the departure gate as he left for Lebanon.
More than a decade later, as police and prosecutors prepare for his trial, mystery still surrounds Kama’s murder. The fate of her money and jewelry are unknown. And although the detective initially in charge of her case described the attack that killed her as “frenzied,” there was “no obvious sign” of sexual assault.
What — or who — ended the life of a young woman who had barely begun to live will be deliberated in court in the months to come, pieced together from the complex threads of the past.
“She was an innocent girl,” her father told the CBC. “(She) was killed for no good reason.”
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