Is an affair key to the riddle of missing lawyer?
THE lawyer who vanished after dropping off her daughter on the school run may have been having an affair, her sister said yesterday.
Renata Antczak, 49, was last seen three weeks ago when she returned home after taking her daughter Victoria, 11, to school. She left the house at 1pm on April 25 and has not been seen since.
Miss Antczak’s sister Danuta Szulc said she suspected she was having secret romantic liaisons with another man during her regular visits to her native Poland.
Speaking from her native Poland, Mrs Szulc told the Mail: ‘It’s possible that she had found a new man in Poland. She was coming back almost on a monthly basis.
‘The last time I heard from her was in a telephone call a few days after Easter. She was uncharacteristically reserved. She was normally a bright and lively person. I asked her what the matter was but she said she would tell me everything when she came back to Poland again at the end of May.’
This latest theory came as Humberside Police continue to investigate what has happened to the mother of two. Her husband, dentist Majid Mustafa, believes she has joined a ‘sect’ after becoming obsessed with a form of alternative therapy.
Miss Antczak asked her 47-year-old husband for a divorce in March and wanted to return to Poland. She was making plans to enrol Victoria at school in her native country from next term.
Dr Mustafa was hoping she might change her mind and even travelled to Poland just before Easter to ask her family why she wanted a divorce, her sister said.
Mrs Szulc, a 61-year-old farmer, said: ‘My sister’s husband came here a few days before Easter and went around the whole family asking why Renata wants to divorce him.
‘He said that she had started the proceedings. He seemed depressed about it, he was uncharacteristically pale and thin.
‘He was a good husband and father. We didn’t want the divorce to happen. He had a good job, a nice house and a car and they had the two children.’
Dr Mustafa has said that for the last six months Miss Antczak has been spending a week per month in Poland, apparently to train as a therapist for a homeopathic health treatment called TimeWaver.
In a publicity video on YouTube, Miss Antczak said she used a TimeWaver machine on her younger daughter which ‘appeared to have a positive effect’ on her health. This machine is made up of a box connected to two electrodes, which patients undergoing treatment are asked to hold.
Practitioners say they are able to use software to make measurements of a patient’s energy levels.
It is reminiscent of the notorious ‘Hubbard Electrometer’, a contraption invented by L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
Speaking from her farm yesterday, Mrs Szulc said: ‘The alternative medicine she was into didn’t make sense to us but her daughter was sick for a long time so she was looking for other ways to help her.’ Dr Mustafa met Miss Antczak in Poland after emigrating from Syria.
The couple married in 1995 in Konstantynow Lodzki, a town near the city of Lodz in central Poland, before moving to the UK 10 years later with their eldest daughter Magda, now 20.
Miss Antczak subsequently gave birth to their second child Victoria. The couple own a detached three-bedroom house in the village of Zabiczki, near Lodz, which they live in during visits to relatives. Last night Miss Antczak’s mother Stanislawa, 84, said she remained hopeful that her daughter was still alive.
She said: ‘I’m a straightforward person and Renata is a straightforward person.
‘I told her not to get divorced, I told her to think of the children. She had already started talking about it in February.
‘When her husband came here just before Easter and I saw how upset he was as the divorce proceedings had started. He was very stressed but it was like he was resigned to it.
‘Even if she just wanted some peace and quiet, it’s out of character of her not to have given me a call to let me know she’s all right.’
Dr Mustafa declined to comment last night. But he had said previously: ‘I still love her very much, I still miss her very much and I want her to come back.
‘If she doesn’t want to stay with me, that’s her choice.’
‘It’s possible she found a new man in Poland’