Mother spends another Christmas without her kidnapped son
INSTEAD of waking up on Christmas morning and opening presents with her beloved six-year-old son Faris, this year for the fourth time in a row, Norma Heeney will spend her day caring for the elderly.
She has bought gifts for Faris and they’ve been placed under the tree – but Norma said that Christmas means nothing without her son.
He was only two when he was spirited away by his Egyptian father Amir Ismaeil, who has no legal rights to him. Faris was smuggled through Dublin airport dressed as a girl and taken to Tanta, north of Cairo, where he has been living ever since.
His heartbroken mother said: ‘I don’t want to think about Christmas’ she said. ‘I can’t see him, I can’t hold him, I can’t talk to him.
‘It’s a living nightmare, it’s hell on earth. I’m broken, but I’m not beaten yet. I won’t ever give up fighting until I get my son back’. Faris was taken from his mother on 28 July 2009 just two weeks after his second birthday; by then, Norma, 33, had split with Amir, 30, whom she met while working in a nursing home in 2006. A year later her son was born but the couple never married. In September 2008 Amir, who moved to Dublin five years earlier with his brothers Tamer, 38, and Moustafa, 28, was charged with raping a woman in Dublin.
Before his trial, he fled the country on a fake passport with Tamer while their younger brother Moustafa kidnapped Faris and smuggled him to Egypt.
He returned to Dublin at the request of the gardaí and was jailed for six years for child abduction.
In October, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter wrote to his counterpart in Egypt asking to open talks on a bilateral agreement on child abduction, but has had no response yet.