Winners and losers may yet change in child-abduction case in Lebanon

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This was published 7 years ago

Winners and losers may yet change in child-abduction case in Lebanon

Ali Elamine's behaviour in negotiations over his half-Australian children led one person to describe him as "pretty face, ugly heart".

By Latika Bourke
Updated

Beirut: The Mediterranean from Jiyeh beach is flat to the horizon this time of year. But it's from this stretch of water that Ali Elamine runs a surf instructing school. A few hundred metres up the road the roller door of his surf shop has been raised but the store remains closed. It's still early on Sunday morning and most of Beirut is asleep.

A daily early morning swimmer, Elamine is nowhere to be seen on this particular dawn. He knows the Australian media, a contingent growing in size by the day, is looking for him.

It was to here, he says, the child abductors lured him, away from his regular school drop-off duties by insisting on a surfing lesson on themorning of Wednesday, April 6. He agreed and left the task of escorting his children to his 70-year old mother, Ibtisam Berri, cousin to the Speaker of Lebanon's parliament, Nabih Berri.

How lucrative can a surfing season be? The answer is not clear until you meet him. Green-eyed, clean-cut and handsome with a Californian drawl, the US-raised Elamine is a man loaded with self-confidence and blessed with political and family connections. "Pretty face, ugly heart" is how one close observer of the parents' negotiations described him by the end of the fortnight. He is a man used to winning.

Sally Faulkner in a mini van shortly after she was released.

Sally Faulkner in a mini van shortly after she was released.Credit: Hussein Malla/AP

This week, 30 kilometres away his soon-to-be ex-wife Sally Faulkner is languishing at the Central Women's Prison in Baabda. The former Emirates flight attendant has been there for more than a week after attempting a high-stakes operation to abduct her children back to Australia.

In May 2015 the children travelled to Lebanon to spend summer with their dad. He never put them on a plane back home. Elamine would use the time difference between Lebanon and Australia to justify to 5½- year-old Lahela and three-year-old Noah their mother's disappearance from their lives.

Still married, Elamine and Faulkner's relationship had broken down over the course of 2014, and even earlier according to friends of hers. Believing her unfaithful and accusing her of failing to help him get residency and a visa to work in Australia, he headed to his homeland without his wife or children in March 2015.

"Lahela kept on telling me mummy's friend would sleep in the same bed and was always around, and I wasn't OK with that," he told an Australian FM radio station this week.

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Ali Elamine speaks to journalists after dropping charges against his estranged wife and the 60 Minutes crew.

Ali Elamine speaks to journalists after dropping charges against his estranged wife and the 60 Minutes crew.Credit: Bilal Hussein

The hit to his pride and honour in family-oriented Lebanon would have been immense – compounded by the fact that within 10 months after Ali's departure, Faulkner and her new partner welcomed a baby.

But it would be her desperation to see her first two children, over whom the Australian courts had granted her custody, that would consume Faulkner's new life and lead to her making her biggest mistake, for which she now looks likely to pay over her lifetime.

Ibtisam Berri with a picture of her granddaughter Lahala Elamine, at her home in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

Ibtisam Berri with a picture of her granddaughter Lahala Elamine, at her home in the southern suburbs of Beirut.Credit: AP

She began contacting child abduction companies and came across Adam Whittington, a dual British-Australian ex-soldier and former Scotland Yard detective who has been exposed as falsely claiming successful child retrievals.

For his services, Faulkner needed money which she did not have, but she knew her story would be ratings dynamite. Channel Nine – no stranger to chequebook journalism – obliged. They paid $69,000 into Whittington's offshore bank account in January to pay for a "missing child investigation". They will claim they were buying the Australian mother's story and they had no idea the overseas bank account she gave them was Whittington's.

Reporter Tara Brown, centre, sound recordist David Ballment, left, and Sally Faulkner, right, after being released from a Beirut jail.

Reporter Tara Brown, centre, sound recordist David Ballment, left, and Sally Faulkner, right, after being released from a Beirut jail.Credit: Nine Network

Whittington proved to be an amateur cowboy at best; a fraud selling pipe dreams to desperate parents at worst. He left a trail everywhere he went from the moment he arrived in Beirut and organised for the abduction to take place in Hadath, a Hezbollah-controlled suburb where Elamine has tight contacts. The raid was carried out in broad daylight, on a busy shopping strip covered by CCTV.

While Elamine had long ago cut off communications, Faulkner's email account was still accessible on the children's iPad, enabling him to monitor in real-time her contact with child abduction agencies.

Sally Faulker with her children, Lahela and Noah.

Sally Faulker with her children, Lahela and Noah.

In the days before the operation, Mohamad Hamza, at the request of his brother in Sweden, an acquaintance of Whittington's, conducted reconnaissance trial runs of Elamine and his children. Elamine boasted he knew of Faulkner's plans every step of the way, but said he didn't do more to stop the operation because he never thought she would go through with them.

When his children were snatched off the street and his elderly mother was knocked to the ground, he knew who to call. Faulkner's reply to assure him that the children were safe with her and not with some unknown abductors would be her final undoing.

Within hours police had arrested the Nine crew, two Lebanese fixers, Whittington and his British associate, Craig Michael, a Cyprus-based part-time tattooist.

Paying Whittington was not the only way Nine got too close. The 60 Minutes crew filmed the kidnapping from a second car and instead of waiting to document the reunion on a yacht en route to Cyprus they accompanied Faulkner in Lebanon. Elamine has demanded the footage never see the light of day. Nine agreed and after reportedly paying half a million dollars, by Wednesday night its crew were boarding Emirates business class, bound for home.

Faulkner, still in Beirut but out of jail, emerged from a custodial hearing on Thursday before Judge Rami Abdullah a broken and defeated woman. With sad eyes and a soft voice she kept repeating to Fairfax Media, "I just want to see my kids, I love my children." She saw her children briefly later that day, but her future relationship with them is irrevocably changed.

The moment she set foot onto Elamine's home soil she walked into a self-made trap. Elamine was quick to strike, insisting she relinquish her most valuable chip.

"It was intense, I told her this was all over and you have to drop your custody charges," he said. She became upset with the reality of what his demand meant. He did not comfort her.

He denies it was payback, but in revealing comments suggested it was her new relationship that made her unfit to look after their children.

"Where she's at I don't think it's the right place for them to be at ... she's moved on, she has a family," he said.

"Obviously that's not the issue," he added but complained "I want [the kids] to be around me ... because the mum wants to move on, because the court system favours the mother over the father. It's not fair for the father to miss out on stuff."

Elamine likes to play the victim. The Australian media are against him, he claims. He says the Australian government was pushing for Faulkner and the Nine crew's freedom. The fresh Australian passports Faulkner was able to obtain without his consent (because of her Australian custodial rights) were further proof of a system stacked against him.

But this week he cleaned up in winner-takes-all stakes and blitzed Australian media post-victory. His ex-wife will return home defeated. Nine's quest to expose a villain ended in the network having to pay him a small fortune.

"For parents – the most important thing in their life is the kids, the kids it is," Elamine said at the end of the saga. He has never told them their mother was in jail and that he had the power to set her free. He hopes Faulkner won't tell them either.

But in the near future there will come a day when his beloved children will work out how to type their own names, their father's name and their mother's name into Google and what they find about the price he made their mother pay may make him the biggest loser of all.

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