Photo offers parents new hope
SHE doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the woman they said goodbye to 12 years ago.
But the picture is parents Fatima and Yusuf Adams’s hope that their daughter Masnoena will return home soon and escape her life of hell with her abusive husband in war-torn Yemen.
Using a description Masnoena gave them and the co-ordinates on her cellphone, a detective and his team managed to trace her location.
They made arrangements for a South African man working in Riyadh to go to Yemen to take photographs of Masnoena so that she could obtain a new passport, enabling her to leave the country once the war subsides.
It is a copy of this passport photograph that has reignited the hope in Masnoena’s parents that they will be reunited with their daughter soon.
“For now, all we can do is pray,” they said.
It is the first time they have seen what Masnoena looks like since she left Cape Town in 2003 for Yemen.
Compared to the glowing, plump Masnoena who left Cape Town, the photograph shows a haggard woman with dark circles under her eyes.
Her parents only recently received the photograph, thanks to the help of senior police detectives and South Africans who read her story in Weekend Argus, the Sunday Tribune’s sister newspaper, in 2013.
Ironically, the image that brought tears to their eyes is also the only glimmer of hope they have that they will ever see their daughter again because it was taken so she could renew her passport to come back to South Africa.
This week, on the eve of her 41st birthday, Masnoena spoke to the Weekend Argus.
“I live in fear… I wish I can get out,” she said.
Her situation has improved since her husband found a job transporting petrol and spends most of his time on the road. “He hasn’t hit me for a year now because he hasn’t been home,” she said. But she said she continued to live in fear.
Masnoena met Saleh Al-Taheri in 2001 and a few months later she introduced him to her parents and sought their blessing to marry him.
It didn’t sit well with her father – even more so when he discovered that Al-Taheri had a civil union with Masnoena two or three months before their Islamic nuptials.
From the outset, Al-Taheri prevented Masnoena from seeing her family and his relationship with her siblings also grew tense.
Then, in 2003, the Yemeni asked Fatima if Masnoena could stay with them for two weeks while he made plans for them to go to Mecca for Hajj (pilgrimage). At that stage, Masnoena’s eldest son was already a year old.
Little did they know that Al-Taheri had no intention of taking his wife to Mecca. Instead, she ended up in Yemen, where she lived in a shack and later gave birth to their second son.
It was there that Masnoena was severely beaten by the man she once loved.
She was only allowed to eat on a Friday and wasn’t allowed to leave the house. Masnoena also discovered that she was his fourth wife and that he had a daughter.
People in Yemen told her that he had physically abused all of his wives.
He let Masnoena contact her parents from a cellphone, but she had to be careful about what she told them because he was always in earshot.
There were times when she managed to tell them about the beatings and beg for them to rescue her.
She could only give them a description of where she was because she didn’t know her precise location.
But her parents were helpless and, even though they beseeched local organisations, Muslim clerics, government departments and political parties to assist them, their pleas fell on deaf ears.
“We only wanted help,” Adams said. But now a detective is helping. “For now, all we can do is pray,” they said.