Little girl lost

SEVEN years after a Sydney toddler disappeared from her bed, the case remains a mystery. Was Rahma El-Dennaoui really abducted?

abduction

ALYAA El-Dennaoui's sad, plump face is framed by a hijab, a simple scarf secured by an elaborate brooch to an all-covering dress. The clothing is designed to protect her modesty but it cannot hide her grief.

As she walks towards the Glebe Coroner's Court along Sydney's Parramatta Road her husband, Hosayn, reaches over and places his arm protectively through hers. They enter the foyer, she wipes away a tear - one of a river - and they shuffle into the courtroom to hear what may have happened to their baby daughter, Rahma. When she disappeared in 2005, at 21 months old, she was the second youngest of their eight children.

What dreadful burdens this mother must bear. She and her husband told police that baby Rahma must have been snatched from their house in Lurnea, near Liverpool in Sydney's southwest, as she lay sleeping in a bedroom with four of her sisters. If this is true, a kidnapper, or pedophile, is still on the loose.

But there is another possibility. Detective Sergeant Nick Sedgwick, who has investigated the disappearance on and off for the past seven years, initially believed Hosayn El-Dennaoui and his wife had nothing to do with their daughter's disappearance. For years, he and the El-Dennaouis were on friendly terms as he hunted down leads, thinking Rahma had been abducted by a sexual predator or spirited overseas in some sort of family rift. Now he believes he was duped and the abduction was staged.

Last month the detective outlined to the NSW Deputy State Coroner, Sharon Freund, a theory about what may have happened. Rahma was a sickly child and in the days leading up to her disappearance she was in pain, suffering from mouth ulcers and teething. She had been crying constantly for days. In a moment of frustration, the detective speculated, Hosayn hurled the girl against a couch and accidentally killed her. If this occurred, it is an event that Alyaa most likely witnessed. Following the death, according to this theory - or an alternate hypothesis that she died from being overmedicated to stop her crying - relatives were contacted and the body of the infant was disposed of, possibly on the farm of a family member.

If the detective's hunch is true, Alyaa El-Dennaoui has lied to police to protect her husband. Since then she has had four more children with this man and is now pregnant with their 13th child. "God knows if I am innocent or not," she told police when re-interviewed about the disappearance of her daughter. "God knows." And, as Alyaa's faith in Islam dictates, His judgment is yet to come.

Hosayn El-Dennaoui, 41, was raised in the Lebanese village of Iaal, near Tripoli, where his father owned a farm and several fruit shops. The population of the village is fewer than 1000 and there are now more people from Iaal living in Sydney than in the foothills of Mount Lebanon. The earlier migrants, who first began arriving more than 40 years ago, settled around Kogarah, in Sydney's south, while the more recent arrivals have clustered in the Liverpool area. Even though they've moved half way around the world, the village structure is still strong. People from Iaal still refer to "the village" even though the village is now spread across the suburbs of southwestern Sydney. As one person whose family migrated from Iaal told The Weekend Australian Magazine, people try to deal with matters "within the village" and there is a general suspicion of authority.

Because of the matters that have been unearthed during the police investigation and aired in court, the El-Dennaouis have been ostracised, to a degree, from their community. Hosayn's brother turned up a few times to the Glebe Coroner's Court, but on many of the 20 days of the inquest the couple had no support. "That says a lot," says the Sydney man, descended from Iaal. "People have spoken ... our culture says the curse of the child is the worst possible curse."

Hosayn El-Dennaoui arrived in Sydney from Iaal at the age of 17 in 1988 and later returned to Lebanon to marry Alyaa, who came from a neighbouring village. Their first child, Marwa, a girl, was born in Lebanon in 1996 when Alyaa was 20. They had four children in Lebanon before Hosayn moved his family to Australia in 2000. They had more children in quick succession; by 2005 they had eight and Alyaa was pregnant with their ninth. In that year the 10 of them were living in a rented house in Hill Road, Lurnea, near Liverpool.

Members of Hosayn's family lease small farms on the outskirts of Sydney to grow produce and work in the fruit and vegetable trade. Hosayn would sometimes work at his brother's fruit shop in Liverpool and on weekends he ran a small fruit stall at Flemington Markets. But mostly he and his family survived on social security benefits. This caused a major rift with his father, Mostafa - a village elder living in Iaal who believed it was wrong for his son to collect money from the government. Mostafa was also concerned that "criminals" were hanging around his son's house and were a bad influence on his grandchildren. Police say Mostafa had cut off all contact with Hosayn, an act that would have brought great shame in Lebanese culture. In the early days of the police investigation substantial resources were dedicated to investigating whether Rahma had been abducted and taken back to Lebanon as a result of this family dispute.

November 9, 2005, was an uneventful day at Hill Road, Lurnea. A number of relatives and friends dropped by the house, as they often did. There were no visitors after about 5pm and that night, according to the El-Dennaouis, all the children apart from Rahma were in bed by 9pm. Rahma stayed up with her parents because she was unsettled by the heat and was teething. Hosayn watched television while his wife made tabbouleh. According to her parents, Rahma fell asleep at around 2am and Hosayn carried her into the bedroom and placed her in a double bed under a window, where she slept with two of her sisters. Two other sisters slept in bunks in the same room. It was a hot night and the window, which faced directly out onto the street, was left open with only a fly screen for protection.

Alyaa woke at about 8am, but did not realise her daughter was missing until about 8.30am. She said she assumed Rahma was still in bed. On learning she was gone, the family searched for 30 minutes before Hosayn made a Triple 0 call to report his daughter's disappearance. "We wake up just now. We can't find our daughter," he said calmly. "She is around two years old." He said yes when the operator asked if the fly screen had been removed, and said his daughter was wearing pink pyjamas with puppies on them.

Police arrived to find a hole had been cut in the fly screen. A cable drum was located beneath the window - a platform that would have allowed an intruder to reach through and take the child. A major search was triggered. The aviation support unit took to the skies, officers door-knocked the suburb, police divers searched creeks and dams in the area while a couple of dirty swimming pools and a dam near the M7 Freeway were drained. The child could not be found.

A task force was formed. Detective Sergeant Sedgwick told the court that his first instinct was to look at the family. "But there were a lot of things that we discovered early on that lessened that suspicion," he said. There were no reports to the Department of Community Services. Neighbours and friends said the children appeared to be well cared for. There were no police records of violence. The children were routinely taken to see the doctor. The detectives found the children to be "extremely polite and well mannered". The principal of Lurnea Public School, where the four older kids were enrolled, reported their attendance and punctuality to be impeccable. They always did their homework. Based on these facts the police quickly came to the conclusion that Rahma had been abducted and that her immediate family had no involvement in her disappearance.

For years the police investigation was guided by this assumption. Police looked into known sex offenders in the area, although, as the coroner later noted, DNA evidence from a suspect, a known sex offender who lived nearby, was not collected from his caravan until 18 months after the abduction. Police also looked into the possibility that she'd been taken overseas to Lebanon by a childless uncle, or because of the family dispute. But all their enquiries came to a dead end. In 2011, Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund informed Detective Sergeant Sedgwick she would be holding an inquest into Rahma's disappearance.

Sedgwick said it was only when he sat down to write the brief for the coroner that he reviewed all the evidence police had gathered. It was not until this point, he said, six years after the little girl had gone missing, that his "focus began to shift" and he realised he needed to reinvestigate the case with a focus on Hosayn El-Dennaoui and his immediate family. "I guess, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have been slightly more thorough in my initial investigation of the family," he told the court.

There were several matters that might have tinkled bells earlier than 2011. When police initially conducted a search of the El-Dennaoui house they found gun parts for a pistol and some laptops that appeared to have been stolen. They also discovered Hosayn had once been a heavy drug user. Just a few weeks after Rahma went missing, a "community source" told police that Hosayn was a well-known drug dealer in the area. The source said that Rahma had swallowed an ecstasy tablet, which had resulted in her death.

Hosayn rejected suggestions that Rahma had swallowed ecstasy and he vehemently denied he was a drug dealer. He did admit, however, that he had had a serious drug addiction. He told police that around 2001 he spent almost six months going to nightclubs in the city almost every night and taking drugs cocaine, heroin and ice. He asked his brother to help him, but was met with disgust. His brother said he didn't care if Hosayn died. Hosayn told police he locked himself in a bedroom for 15 days to detox and did not leave the room. Alyaa confirmed this, telling police she had to change the sheets around him because he would not come out, even to go to the toilet. Hosayn told police that by the time of Rahma's disappearance he was no longer using drugs.

The police brief also states "there is evidence that Hosayn had at least one extramarital relationship". While the guns, the drugs and the affair did not link Hosayn to the disappearance of his daughter, they should have been a trigger for police to investigate more thoroughly. That and the fact that several neighbours reported hearing the sound of male "Arabic voices arguing" coming from the El-Dennaoui house in the early hours on the day that Rahma went missing.

Two years after Rahma's disappearance, the commander of the NSW Homicide Squad, Detective Superintendent Peter Cotter, was interviewed by Ray Hadley on the Sydney radio station 2GB. Hadley asked: "Why doesn't the media in Australia give the disappearance of Rahma as much coverage as that of Madeleine McCann [who disappeared in 2007 in Portugal]?" It was a legitimate question, although there had been coverage of Rahma's disappearance on television, in print and on radio. In May 2007, the magazine New Idea offered a $20,000 reward, which was followed in 2008 with a $100,000 reward offered by NSW police minister David Campbell. (It was increased this year to $250,000.) Police appeared on Mel and Kochie's Sunrise TV show to make appeals.

But Hadley was right. This issue was not taken up with great enthusiasm by the Australian media. The abduction of young children in this manner is extremely rare in Australia, but Rahma El-Dennaoui has not become a household name in way that Daniel Morcombe, Kiesha Abrahams, Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie and the Beaumont children have. Television crews did not camp outside the El-Dennaoui house for weeks on end as they did for the Sydney collar-bomb victim Madeleine Pulver.

As for police resources, Detective Sergeant Sedgwick told me that, following the initial search, there "were about 10 detectives" working on the case for the first six months and "four to six" for the next six months. After that he was largely on his own, when he wasn't working on other cases. This doesn't compare to the resources Queensland Police put into investigating the abduction of Daniel Morcombe, who disappeared from the Sunshine Coast in 2003. The 2010 inquest into his disappearance heard that for a time there were more than 100 investigators working on the case and that a core team of detectives worked on possible leads for years. It was said to be one of the most extensively investigated crimes in Queensland's history.

Daniel Morcombe was snatched from the side of the road while he was waiting for a bus. Detectives initially believed that Rahma had been snatched from her bed while she lay sleeping with her sisters. The crimes were equally sinister but the response could not have been more different. The abduction of the bright-eyed Australian boy Danny Morcombe got blanket media coverage and immense police resources. The abduction of Rahma El-Dennaoui, a little brown-eyed Australian girl with curly brown hair, but of Lebanese descent, did not.

A boy aged about 10 greets me at the door of the El-Dennaoui house in Ashcroft. It's a few suburbs away from the house in Hill Road, Lurnea, where Rahma was apparently abducted. There are manicured roses in the front garden and a row of infant figs. The fences are festooned with "Warning - Ultimate Security" signs. The boy is neat and polite and he ushers me into a front room with couches and Arabic scripts on the wall - it's the El-Dennaoui's good room. Marwa, 17, the oldest of the 11 children, comes in and introduces herself. Her hair is concealed by a pale pink hijab and she's dressed in a pink top and a floral skirt with leggings. She's confident and bright and we soon learn that she is to be the interpreter for her mum and, sometimes, her dad. When she finishes school she wants to study and then open her own childcare centre - "Like, I've already got tonnes of experience," she says, motioning to the busload of siblings out the back.

The house, a new five-bedroom dwelling belonging to Housing NSW, is spotless. Hosayn enters the room, followed by Alyaa, who is heavily pregnant she's 36 and has been pretty much pregnant all her adult life. When he sits down on the couch, his two youngest girls crawl all over him; he cuddles them until their wriggling gets too much and then shuffles them off to play out the back. It quickly becomes clear that these are not neglected kids and this does not appear to be a dysfunctional household.

Their eldest boy arrives with a tray of cool drinks for the men and we get down to business. Following Sedgwick's epiphany in 2011 he applied for warrants for listening devices to monitor the El-Dennaouis and their relatives, which became active as they re-interviewed family members and the coronial inquest began in April this year. It's a standard technique, to see how people react and communicate among themselves under pressure. What these recordings revealed was that when the family talked about the case they talked in code, referring in Arabic to "cutting the grass". In one recording, Hosayn seemed to be boasting to his wife after he had first given evidence to the inquest: "The judge and the prosecutor can't get to me, so do you think the lawyers can get to me?" And he and others repeatedly joked about collecting the $250,000 reward and splitting the money. "It was a joke," Hosayn says to me, explaining it away as black humour. "I know it's not nice ... we are not joking about my daughter. But it is something that Lebanese do. We joke a lot about everything that happens in life." He tells me he has "no idea" or no answer for why they would be talking in code, something the court heard was "highly suspicious".

Hosayn says that for "six years and a half " he and "Detective Nick" had a very good relationship and would talk, often many times a week, about developments in the case. It was only this year that the relationship soured. In his statement, Detective Sergeant Sedgwick said it appeared that several pieces of evidence had been tampered with. The couch, which it was alleged Rahma may have been thrown against, had been moved and a washing basket placed on top of it to conceal it, he believed, from police when they originally came to the house. It was not DNA-tested. And it was only when police re-interviewed the family in the lead-up to the inquest that Alyaa told them she had cleaned the yard the day before the alleged abduction, and that was when she moved the cable roll under the window. The cable roll was vital because it could have provided a platform for an abductor to stand on while plucking Rahma from her bed. The detective speculated the cable roll was moved on the night of Rahma's disappearance to help fabricate the abduction.

Hosayn says they did not try to conceal these things from the police and points out that they were never asked about them at the time. "My wife and I went to Liverpool Police Station [in the days following their daughter's disappearance] and they only interviewed us for one hour and a half," he says. "I wish now they did big investigation on us, that they put lots of pressure on us. Now they are asking a lot of questions about what happened seven years ago and I have forgotten."

I ask Alyaa how the disappearance of her little girl has affected her. She clasps her hands in front of her chest and then pulls them apart, speaking in Arabic. "My mum says that it has broken her heart in two," Marwa explains. I ask her if she is religious. Very much, her daughter answers. Is she comfortable to face Allah at the end of her life and be accountable to Him? She looks me in the eye and her daughter interprets. "Allah knows I have done nothing wrong. Only Allah knows where my daughter is." She says she is at peace with her God.

The court heard that in the years following the abduction of Rahma the four girls continued to sleep in the same room from which their sister had disappeared. No additional security was put in place. When I raise this with Hosayn he says his landlord wouldn't pay for security screens and bars. Hosayn says he saved his money and over time bought steel grills, which cost him $1000. "Come look," he says.

He leads me outside, past a patch of parsley large enough to keep a family of 13 in tabbouleh, to where half a dozen steel security grills are propped against a wall. The grills arrived just before the El-Dennaouis were informed they would be moving. They're the wrong size for this new house.

Back in the lounge room, we revisit the subject of Hosayn's drug addiction. He reiterates that he was open with the police and told them he'd had a problem in 2001. "I told Detective Jenny in Liverpool and I told him, Detective Nick," he says. "I don't want to hide nothing from them."

All the while Marwa interprets when her mother or father can't find the words. She tells me it has been very difficult for her and it has affected her studies. It was very hard to read that her father was accused of being a drug dealer "when I know he's not". Her friends, she says, don't like to talk about her sister's disappearance in case it upsets her. "Some teachers say, 'Are your parents all right - do you believe them?' I tell them it is not true, but [I know] they think it is true." Marwa was 10 when Rahma disappeared. "Look at this house," she says, as her brothers and sisters run past her. "Do you think this is a house that could keep such a dreadful secret?"

If the policeman's assumptions are correct, at about 2am on November 10, 2005, Rahma was thrown against the couch and killed, or died due to some sort other "mishap", as Sedgwick put it. Hosayn's sister-in-law - who police now believe may have been in the house, helping tend the sick Rahma - then contacted Hosayn's brother, her husband. He arrived to collect the dead baby. The theory goes that by 9am, when the police arrived, the adults had concocted a story about the abduction, moved the cable drum outside the window and cut a hole in the fly screen. They left no clues and they were able to conceal this activity from the children in the house. And, according to this police theory, they've been able to keep a lid on this dreadful secret for seven years. Within a few hours of Rahma's death they were able to hide her body some place where it would not be found and be back to be interviewed by police.

At the end of the coronial inquest last month, Deputy State Coroner Sharon Freund noted that Rahma would now be almost nine and in year three at primary school "discovering the joy of chapter books, school excursions, family gatherings and friends". But she had disappeared and "no child should disappear in this day and age in suburban Australia". There were a "number of shortcomings and issues" surrounding the police case, she said, particularly concerning their inquiries into the known sex offender "and why the investigation was not conducted in a more timely manner". She would not "delve further into the inadequacies" because the matter was ongoing.

She said it was unfortunate the initial investigation into Hosayn and Alyaa El-Dennaoui had not been more thorough as that may have allowed her to rule out the El-Dennaouis as suspects in their daughter's disappearance. "The evidence that was borne out during the final two weeks of the inquest did nothing, in my view, to exculpate Rahma's immediate family," she said. "There are aspects of their evidence I find troubling." Among other things, she was troubled by the family's jokes about collecting the reward money for the kidnapping and their talking in code.

While there was no conclusive evidence to suggest the El-Dennaouis had staged the kidnap, she refused to make a positive finding that Rahma was kidnapped by a person or persons unknown and that the immediate family had not staged her disappearance. She would not clear the El-Dennaouis. "Rahma El-Dennaoui did not simply vanish into thin air," she said. "Only those involved with her disappearance know the truth, and they will ultimately be held accountable." She made an open finding and referred the matter back to the NSW Homicide Squad for further investigation.

The El-Dennaouis say they welcome the coroner's decision and hope the police can come up with answers, even though it leaves them in limbo, under a cloud of suspicion until they can be proven innocent. "More than anyone," Hosayn tells me, "we want to find out what happened to Rahma."

As we leave the warmth of the El-Dennaoui house, after cups of Arabic coffee and handfuls of fruit, the photographer Adam Knott and I discuss how difficult it is to believe that these people have somehow killed and disposed of their baby. They just don't appear to be that sort of family. "Either that," he says, "or they are the best actors I've ever come across."