Mystery over missing man in Bahrain
Manama, June 16, 2014
An American woman is appealing for help to trace her Pakistani husband who she believes went missing in Bahrain last week.
Mystery surrounds the disappearance of Ahmed Muhammed Nawaz, 26, who last contacted his wife Darline Coupet via e-mail last Monday - supposedly from a Bahrain hospital bed, said a report in the Gulf Daily News (GDN), our sister publication.
Nawaz said he had been involved in a road accident on May 31, a day after landing in Bahrain to take up a job as an accountant at Nass Corporation.
However, a company spokeswoman told the GDN yesterday that they have no employees going by that name and Coupet said she had been in contact with both Salmaniya Medical Complex (SMC) and the BDF Hospital, but neither facility has any record of Nawaz as an inpatient.
"We were in touch on Whatsapp as soon as he landed, when he told me that he was waiting for someone from his employer to pick him up," said Coupet, who did not want to give her age.
"Later he sent me an e-mail on May 31 saying that he lost his phone and could not be in touch.
"He told me that he would get a new phone soon and contact me, but then it was silence until June 9.
"All the while I was trying to send messages to his phone and someone was receiving them, but wasn't answering me.
"I assume someone has his phone and I urged the person to tell me where he found the phone, but no luck."
Coupet, who is originally from Florida and has been working as a teacher in Al Ain, UAE, for five years, said that her husband told her in his e-mail that he was using a nurse's phone and had lost all his contact numbers.
"All he remembered was being hit by a BMW at night while he was crossing a street," she said.
"He said he opened his eyes to find himself in a hospital after almost eight days.
"He told me that he had head and leg injuries and could not walk."
In his last message to his wife, Nawaz said his new employer was airlifting him to Saudi Arabia for treatment, but when Coupet replied that she was in Bahrain looking for him and asked where he was, the communication stopped.
"I went to the police station, who said they could do nothing without a CPR number," she said.
"At SMC, they said that an air ambulance had flown in two days ago to pick up a patient, but they would not reveal the name."
When she approached the Pakistan Embassy, officials there were able to confirm with Bahraini immigration authorities that no one named Ahmed Muhammed Nawaz had entered Bahrain in the past two weeks.
Yet Coupet refuses to believe that her husband might have left her - insisting that they had a strong relationship, which began in 2010 and was cemented by marriage in Thailand two years later.
Contact
"I can't believe that could be true - if that was true why did he contact me from the hospital," she said.
"I had been supporting him all through when he was unemployed and we were always in touch."
Coupet said she had not contacted Nawaz's family in Pakistan, where her husband was based while he was job-hunting, for fear of worrying his elderly mother.
"I don't want to upset the family by checking if he is there," she said.
"I urge anyone who has seen my husband or has his phone, or any information about him, to please help me reach him."
A Nass Corporation spokeswoman told the GDN yesterday that they had no one matching Ahmed Muhammed Nawaz's details on record.
"Coupet was here and upon her request we did our best to see if her husband had joined us," she said.
"We even checked with the Labour Market Regulatory Authority, (LMRA) who said there was no one by this name on their system."
No one from SMC or the LMRA were available for comment when contacted by the GDN yesterday. - TradeArabia News Service
