Dubai: A Moroccan-American mother is pleading with Saudi authorities to locate her two sons Adam and Elias who have been confirmed to be living in the kingdom with her ex-husband who is wanted in the US for kidnapping.
Speaking to Gulf News, Hind Kettani says she has been living in complete agony since the last time she saw her boys in November of 2011.
The neurologist who resides in New York has been involved in a legal battle for the past two years working with international lawyers and the FBI to find out the whereabouts of her ex-husband who left Morocco with her two sons and cut off communication.
In 2001, Hind married Faisal Tahiri in Morocco and then moved to France where her husband worked as a physician.
Four years later, Hind gave birth to their first son Adam in New York where they had relocated. When her second son Elias was born in 2007, Hind says the couple began having problems after Tahiri ran a DNA test on his son after doubting his paternity.
The next few years, the couple carried on with the marriage despite problems and in the summer of 2009 they took their children for vacation to Morocco.
Hind says, her husband confiscated her sons’ US passports so she was unable to take them back to the United States with her.
For the next few months Hind would spend her time between New York and Morocco until she found out her husband had moved to Bermuda to work taking her sons with them.
In August of 2010 Hind started the procedure for divorce in Morocco and she says it took over a year for the government to issue a custody order and then another three months for the US embassy to issue to her the children’s passports.
Charged in absentia
At the end of the tiring legal proceedings, Hind went back to Morocco in 2012 to get her sons and bring them back, but when she arrived she found out that her husband had disappeared with no trace.
Back in New York she opened a police and federal case against her ex-husband and worked with the FBI in hopes of locating them.
Tahiri never showed up to any of the court proceedings, instead having his lawyer represent him. He was charged in absentia with kidnapping.
Hind says her husband was confirmed to be living in Saudi Arabia in June 2013, and so far has received no response from the Saudi police or interior ministry on her request to extradite her ex-husband and return her children.
“I know they are missing me,” Hind says. “If I was tired Adam would come and massage my back and if I was cold he would cover me with his blanket.”
“When we took naps together Adam and Elias would draw a line over my chest to split me into two — one for each of them,” she recalled fondly. Despite the years and painstaking efforts she spent trying to get her sons back, Hind says she has faith in God that her sons will be returned to her. She only hopes that there will be enough political pressure on Saudi authorities to cooperate with the extradition.
