الكاتب: kafej

A convicted killer signed an extraordinary $50,000 contract with his victim’s family to reveal what happened to her body.

Nizamodeen Hosein had kept the secret of Muriel McKay’s fate for more than 50 years, long after his release from prison, until her family made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.

But after signing an agreement that would have rescued him from a life of poverty, he turned down the money (the equivalent of £43,000) and told the family how and where Muriel died.

At his squalid, remote home in Trinidad he explained to their lawyer: “I don’t want the money. Money wasn’t my objective, it was peace of mind.

“Talking about it now breaks my heart. I was young, 22, I didn’t feel the pain like I’m feeling now.”

Hosein, aged 75 and in poor health, has offered to return to the UK, from where he was deported at the end of his life sentence in 1990, to show Mrs McKay’s daughter Dianne and her grandson Mark Dyer the site of Muriel’s remains.

He claims she died from a heart attack at a Hertfordshire farm owned by his brother Arthur a few days after they kidnapped and held her for a £1m ransom at Christmas in 1969.

Mr Dyer, a businessman who drew up the contract with lawyers, said: “It may seem odd to many people that we should pay Nizam Hosein for the information, but our offer unlocked everything after many years of his silence and our sadness and frustration.

“It seemed our last chance of ever finding out what happened to my grandmother.

“Nizam could certainly have made good use of the cash because he is living in a hut with rotting floorboards, no proper sanitation and poisonous snails climbing the walls.

“He seems to have rejected the money because he wants closure. He’s getting old and he’s frail and it was perhaps his chance to atone for what he did.

“Our lawyer gave him the first $500 and he just pushed it away. For me, that gave him legitimacy.”

Read more:
Deported killer offers to return to UK to show victim’s family where body is buried
Family of murdered Muriel McKay urge police to launch new search

Muriel was aged 55 and the wife of newspaper executive Alick McKay, deputy to press baron Rupert Murdoch – who had just bought the Sun and News of the World.

The bungling brothers mistook Muriel for Murdoch’s first wife Anna after following the wrong car, Murdoch’s Rolls Royce, to the McKay home in Wimbledon, South London.

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After days of playing cat and mouse with the police – and a bodged attempt to pick up a suitcase of ransom money – the kidnappers were caught and arrested at the farm.

However, there was no sign of Muriel and they refused to say what had happened to her.

They were jailed for life after one of the first murder convictions without the discovery of the victim’s body. Arthur Hosein died in prison in 2009.

Last year, Scotland Yard searched part of the farmland near the village of Stocking Pelham after talking to Hosein on a video link, but he later insisted they had dug in the wrong place.

Some of the farm buildings, fencing and gates have been changed in the intervening years since the murder, which gripped the public and made worldwide headlines at the time.

Detectives have sent Hosein a list of more than 80 questions in a bid to check his story and narrow down the true burial site.

They are in contact with the McKays and considering applying for a warrant for a new search at the farm.

The family has launched a petition calling on the Home Office to lift Hosein’s deportation order temporarily so he can revisit the farm.

He said: “If I go back to the farm, I will remember where I put the body. I am sure I can go to the spot directly.”

Israel and Hamas agreed to extend a four-day truce in Gaza by two more days, after Hamas pledged to free more Israeli captives in exchange for Israel releasing more Palestinian prisoners.

For the people of Gaza, it means more relief from bombardment and an increase in humanitarian supplies to Gaza.

So what happens next? What would both sides need to give up to bring about a longer peace?

Or is Israel simply going to return to war?

Presenter: Laura Kyle

Guests:

Mehran Kamrava – Professor of government at Georgetown University in Qatar

Gideon Levy – Columnist at Haaretz newspaper

Omar Rahman – Fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs

Bangkok, Thailand – Somphat Satanavat has big plans for his wedding day.

He has started looking for just the right hotel for the banquet, something in a neoclassical or colonial style. He knows the type of traditional Thai music he wants played and pondered the guest list.

But as a gay man in Thailand, where the law says that marriage must be between a man and a woman, it is still just a dream for him and his partner of 25 years.

For now, Somphat said, “I [am] planning just in my mind.”

That may soon change.

Last week the cabinet of the Thai government endorsed a bill that would amend the country’s Civil and Commercial Code to define marriage as between any two “individuals”.

If approved by Parliament, it would make Thailand the first country in Southeast Asia to legalise same-sex marriage and only the second in all of Asia, after Taiwan.

The government is hoping to move quickly and to hold the first of three votes the bill will need to pass to become law by next month.

“The prime minister [wants to] push [it] very much. He wants to see this bill appear in the Parliament debate as soon as possible,” government spokesperson Chai Watcharong told Al Jazeera.

If and when approved, “all legal rights after they marry will be 100 percent like man and woman,” he said.

“We consider that there is no reason to say no because people should have the right to decide their own way of living. Even though they are male and male, they love each other…so they should have the right,” he added.

Thailand has been here before

The previous two administrations each sponsored a same-sex union or marriage bill of their own. But they failed to make it out of the lower house before Parliament was dissolved to make way for national elections, setting the process back to square one each time.

LGBTQ rights advocates say this is the best chance Thailand has had yet to get the law passed.

Thailand’s current government is only months into a four-year mandate, which allows plenty of time to push the bill through barring a sudden coup or collapse. Major parties on both sides of the aisle are also in favour of the legislation.

Rapeepun Jommaroeng, an adviser and policy analyst for the Rainbow Sky Association of Thailand, which advocates for LGBTQ rights, expects pushback from some religious groups, mainly from the predominantly Buddhist country’s Christian and Muslim minorities. But, he says, they are unlikely to derail the bill.

“The country has been clear that we will not force any religious leaders or priests or monks to perform the [same-sex] marriage ceremony,” Rapeepun said.

“This law is not about forcing people to do things they don’t want to. This is purposefully broad to enable people to have equality,” he said.

“It’s just only to give the liberty and freedom for two people to be united.”

Rapeepun passage of the bill will also be eased by the fact that Thailand allows Islamic law to replace some national laws – except those dealing with defence or security – for Muslims who live in the southernmost provinces, where they are in the majority. That should make the Civil and Commercial Code, and any amendments, inapplicable to southern Muslims.

Chai, the government spokesperson, confirmed to Al Jazeera that the code does not apply to Muslims in those provinces.

For the rest of the country, the LGBTQ community say the bill portends a new dawn for Thailand, one that promises to bring them a greater sense of respect, equality and freedom to be themselves.

If passed, “it means that the country has progressed to another level of civil liberty or civil freedom to recognize the diversity in Thai society,” Rapeepun said.

“This is a time that they can celebrate and they can be themselves and they don’t need to lie any more.”

It can literally mean the difference between life and death, says Tunyawat Kamolwongwat, who was among the first four openly LGBTQ lawmakers elected to Thailand’s Parliament in 2019.

Re-elected this past May, he recalled a trip to the north of the country last year, when a young woman approached him to share the story of a close friend, who was gay, driven to suicide by his family’s rejection.

“He decided to kill himself because his family [did] not accept his life[style]. She told me that story and I [was] crying, and I think it will [soon] change so people can come out,” Tunyawat said.

Tunyawat said recognition of same-sex marriage would give LGBTQ people a voice they had long been denied.

“We can stand up and talk to the one who bullies us that I’m a human because we all have equal rights.”

The law would also allow same-sex couples to adopt children and open up a raft of other opportunities reserved for those who are married.

“It’s not only marriage status, to announce that they are a couple by law. But another thing is it’s related to social welfare and social services and other benefits combined with the law,” said Kath Khangpiboon, a trans woman and advocate who teaches gender studies at Thailand’s Thammasat University.

The benefits include tax deductions and the right for spouses to give each other medical consent, co-manage property and pass on wealth.

Such issues have weighed heavy on the mind of Somphat, who owns a confectionary company and worries about being able to pass on his stake in the operation to his life and business partner if he should die, or about his partner being denied to right to make medical decisions for him should he ever slip into a coma.

For LGBTQ employees of the government, marriage would also give them newfound access to a suite of public health benefits.

Most Thais seem ready

Somphat recalled a friend, a trans woman, who teaches at a government school whose partner needed thousands of dollars to pay for medical care to treat a life-threatening illness.

Because they could not get married, Somphat recounted, the woman could not add her partner to her health plan and they could not afford the treatment, and he died.

“I don’t want just to exchange the rings, have a beautiful day with flowers, with friends,” Somphat said. “We need … our country’s law [to] accept what I am,” he said.

Should Parliament pass the bill, advocates say the law can finally start catching up with Thailand’s image as a country that accepts, even embraces the LGBTQ community.

A 2022 survey by the government’s National Institute of Development Administration found that nearly 80 percent of those polled supported legalizing same-sex marriage.

Advocates blame the lack of progress to date on such a law on the outsize influence of conservative political donors or on the military, which aligns itself with the country’s deeply conservative monarchy and wields significant political power itself, whether directly or via proxy parties.

Rapeepun also ascribed the delay to pressure from some of Thailand’s neighbours.

In Southeast Asia, Brunei and Malaysia, both Muslim-majority countries, and Myanmar all outlaw gay or lesbian sex. He hopes Thailand will soon become a “beacon” of hope for those pining for change elsewhere, or at least a haven for those seeking respite from persecution for their sexual orientation.

Somphat is eager for the day that happens.

“The first day, if possible, I will go to the government office and sign up to get married,” he said.

Then, he added, “I can tell anyone, by the law he’s my husband… I think it will be a very happy time.”

Talks between US and Israeli spy agencies in Qatar, which is key mediator, include issue of captives held in Gaza.

The heads of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israel’s Mossad have met in Qatar to discuss the extension of a truce between Israel and Hamas as well as the captives being held by the Palestinian group in Gaza.

CIA Director William Burns and David Barnea, head of the Mossad intelligence service, held talks with Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, on Tuesday, a day after Doha announced a two-day extension of an original four-day humanitarian pause in Gaza that had been due to expire.

“We have to read a little bit between the lines here: [The intelligence chiefs were] important in the last meeting, which was on November 9. We believe that was one of the stepping stones getting us to the initial four-day deal,” Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays said.

“The fact that we’ve got intelligence chiefs sitting here with the Qatari prime minister, who is also the foreign minister, is interesting because they’ve got the intelligence picture. But also I think it’s interesting partly because of who the US has got leading this effort,” he said, adding that Burns is “more experienced a negotiator than Antony Blinken”, the United States secretary of state. 

Both Israel and Hamas have accused each other of violating the original truce. But they have continued to swap captives for prisoners. Hamas has released captives in its custody, with another 12 freed on Tuesday.

Our teams have successfully facilitated the release and transfer of 12 hostages held in Gaza.

We have been able to carry out this operation thanks to our neutral intermediary role.

— ICRC in Israel & OT (@ICRC_ilot) November 28, 2023

Majed al-Ansari, a spokesperson for Qatar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a post on X that 30 Palestinian prisoners are set to be released.

On Monday, mediator Qatar said a humanitarian pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas would be extended by two days, hours before the initial four-day truce in Gaza was set to expire.

Qatar, the US and Egypt have engaged in intense negotiations to establish and prolong the truce in Gaza.

Over the course of the initial pause, Hamas released 69 captives – 51 Israelis and 18 people from other nations.

In exchange, 150 Palestinian prisoners– 117 children and 33 women – held in Israeli prisons were released and more humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza.

The talks between the US and Israeli intelligence chiefs and Qatar were also attended by Egyptian officials.

“Is there a way that they can try and deal with the central problem here of keeping this [current truce] going while Israel at the same time wants to remove Hamas?” Bays asked.

“We don’t know anything from the information on the ground, but one possibility that some are suggesting is perhaps a deal could be done for the Hamas military leadership to be persuaded to go into exile in another country,” he said.

“That’s certainly not what we’re hearing from Israeli media sources; the latest we’re hearing from them is that the Israeli government does not want an extension beyond 10 days in total, taking us until the end of Sunday,” according to Bays.

Meanwhile, far-right Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow soldiers to return to fighting in Gaza to “crush Hamas” as he reacted to an army statement that three explosive devices were detonated in two locations near troops in northern Gaza.

“We must not wait until our fighters are killed. We must once again act in accordance with the goal of the war: the total destruction of Hamas,” the minister posted on X.

“When I leave my home, I feel like a fish out of water.” A family in Gaza chose to return to live in the ruins of their house after it was destroyed in the Israeli bombardment of the besieged enclave.