The snow is melting and the birds are singing but for Odd Petter Magnussen, spring is the cruellest season. It reminds the Norwegian marketing executive of the horrible death of his daughter.
Martine Vik Magnussen, a pretty, vivacious 23-year-old, was raped and strangled on March 14, three years ago, in London. Farouk Abdulhak, the jet-setting son of a Yemeni billionaire, is wanted in connection with the murder; a trail of blood led from the body, dumped and partially buried in a Knightsbridge basement, to his flat, where there were signs of a struggle.
There is no extradition treaty between Britain and Yemen and by the time police found the body, Abdulhak, the last person to have been seen with Martine after leaving a nightclub with her, had already fled to his homeland. He has refused to return to give evidence. It makes the family’s grief that much harder to bear.
“Unless he gives himself up, we won’t get closure,” Magnussen, 59, said last week from his home on an island off Norway. “Unless he gives himself up, we won’t know what happened to Martine in the last minutes of her life.”
Magnussen has tried diplomatic channels but with no luck. The suspect, according to some accounts, is being sheltered from justice by his powerful family. “There’s a legal vacuum,” he said. “If you get away from one country after committing a crime and go to another where there is no extradition treaty, then it seems you are home free.”
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There may, at last, be reason for optimism, however: friends and supporters have taken their “Justice for Martine” campaign onto the internet with stunning results. They are hitting the father of the suspected murderer in the pocket.
More than 53,000 people signed up to a boycott of Coca-Cola products on a Facebook page last month after learning that Shaher Abdulhak, the father and one of Yemen’s richest men, owned a large stake in the company’s local bottling and distribution network and was a member of the board of directors in Egypt. The firm subsequently announced that it was ceasing all collaboration with him.
Besides other interests ranging from oil exploration to arms dealing, Abdulhak senior, a friend of Yemen’s president, is also the chief Mercedes importer in Yemen. Or was: Daimler-Benz has dropped all dealings with him. Philips and Whirlpool have said that they will follow suit after being lobbied by Justice for Martine campaigners.
Shaher Abdulhak, whose worth is estimated at up to £3 billion, has threatened, through a representative in London, to sue various Norwegian MPs who wrote letters to companies urging them to cease trading with him on moral and ethical grounds. This has not deterred the campaigners: by the end of last week they had shifted their attention to Xerox in an effort to stop it from trading with him.
Some saw in this Norwegian internet activism another example of the extraordinary power of new media to embarrass governments and multinational corporations into changing their ways.
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“People react to what they believe is a great injustice,” says Sturla Ellingvag, organiser of the Coca-Cola boycott, explaining the extraordinary response to the campaign.
He displays a fear similar to that of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, in suspecting that dark forces are attempting to hinder the campaign, perhaps by putting pressure on Facebook, which was said to have removed the page announcing the boycott of Coca-Cola. By yesterday, the Facebook page was again available on the web.
“When you challenge large multinationals, of course it’s a dirty business,” Ellingvag said. “We have no illusions about that.” He added that the activists would demand proof from the American drinks company that it had cut off relations with Abdulhak.
For Marcus Rolandsen, founder of the Justice for Martine movement, the pressure being brought to bear on the suspect’s father is a legitimate means of encouraging the son to return to Britain for questioning.
“The family has a moral obligation to make sure that Farouk Abdulhak is made available for questioning in the UK,” he said. “This issue will not be swept under the [carpet].”
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Magnussen, the father, does not want to sound vindictive and prefers to distance himself from the campaign being waged in his daughter’s name. Yet he must be thrilled by it.
“People are fed up with cheating and corruption,” he said. “People want more ethics. The world is more transparent than ever before. No one should be beyond the law. That is the essence of the Martine case.”
He is amazed by the support that has been generated on the internet. “I have a natural reaction to what happened because it is my daughter. Other people did not know her and do not have a link to her in person. The amount of engagement out there is amazing.
“You can see a shift from the traditional top-down power structure to a down-upward one as this power-to-the-people media concept takes hold. It has never been seen before in the history of mankind.”
Often on business in Egypt, the head of the Abdulhak family keeps a low profile in Sana’a, the ancient and now dangerous capital of Yemen. The publicity-shy businessman lets Peters & Peters, his lawyers in London, speak for him.
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Through these British spokesmen he dismisses as “scurrilous and malicious nonsense” the theory that he is sheltering his son from justice. He says that he has always urged the boy to co-operate fully with British authorities, but to no avail.
The Norwegian MPs supporting the Justice for Martine campaign are amused by threats from Abdulhak to pursue them for loss of earnings caused by their activism unless they withdraw the letters they wrote and apologise for sending them. They take it as a signal that their quarry is feeling the heat.
“We will not be stopped in this effort,” said Michael Tetzschner, a Conservative MP. “It will take more than a law firm sending a message under a fancy letterhead to make an impression.” Heikki Holmas, another of the MPs, said: “I believe that it is completely correct for us to do whatever we can to solve this terrible murder.”
The case has become a cause célèbre in Norway.
On the night of her murder, Martine, who had moved to London to begin a course in international business relations at the Regent’s business school, was celebrating the end of term with several friends at a fashionable club in Mayfair. One of them was 21-year-old Farouk Abdulhak.
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She got into a taxi with him at the end of the evening and was not seen alive again. Two days later police found her partially buried under rubble. There were signs of a struggle. A neighbour reported hearing strange noises in the middle of the night.
By 2009, police had put Abdulhak on Scotland Yard’s most wanted list in connection with Magnussen’s rape and murder. They also issued an international warrant for his arrest.
He had long since left the country, however: it has been established that he flew to Cairo just hours after the murder. From Egypt, he boarded his father’s private jet home to Yemen.
Magnussen, his former wife and their two other children were devastated. What makes the grief that much harder to bear is the knowledge that the killer remains at large.
A Norwegian documentary crew travelled to Yemen in the summer of 2009 and filmed a lawyer for the Abdulhak family admitting that Farouk lives at home with his family and studies Arabic at the local university.
Kjell Magne Bondevik, the former Norwegian prime minister, has been using his old contacts to try to arrange a meeting with the suspect’s father, so far without success. He is hoping that anti- government protests in Yemen might contribute to a solution.
“With the regime tottering, it could put pressure on the father, who will put pressure on the son, in order to improve the international reputation of the current regime,” he said.
“But it could also have the opposite effect. They will be so occupied with maintaining control that this matter will be left lying in the bottom of a drawer.”
The Justice for Martine campaign aims to make sure that does not happen.
One of the campaigners is Marianne Vikas, a journalist whose book about the murder alleges that Abdulhak senior came under the scrutiny of the CIA when he was suspected of selling weapons to Hamas, the Palestinian militant Islamist group, in the early 2000s.
Coca-Cola’s decision to stop trading with him, she said, was “a big, big victory for justice”. She continued: “It shows that people like me and you can have an influence.”
The US government has also been drawn into the drama, because Farouk Abdulhak has dual American and Yemeni citizenship.
“The USA continues to work with our partners in Norway and the UK to seek justice,” said an American embassy spokesman in Oslo, without elaborating.
As for Magnussen, he tries not to waste energy on negative feelings. He has had offers from individuals ready to track down the suspect and kill him in Yemen. He has declined.
“I don’t want revenge in any way,” Magnussen said. “I just want justice for my daughter.”
Additional reporting: Kjetil Stormark in Oslo and Iona Craig in Sana’a
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