The Ukrainian wife of a Palestinian kidnapped on Ukrainian soil and taken to an Israeli jail the next day still has no answers to how and by whom he was seized.
Late on March 21, Veronika Abu Sisi sank into a chair in her parents’ modest flat just outside Kyiv after an exhausting day of meetings with lawyers, police officers and officials.
Despite several weeks of frantic efforts, including appeals to Ukraine’s president, Interior Ministry and security service, she’s still waiting for an answer to the question that has been tormenting her for the past month: What happened to her husband?
Palestinian power plant engineer Dirar Abu Sisi disappeared from a Kharkiv-Kyiv train on Feb. 19 while in Ukraine to apply for a residency permit.
One day later, he turned up in an Israeli jail.
How can I explain to my children that their father wasn’t killed by a bomb in Palestine but disappeared from a train in a democratic country?”
– Veronika Abu Sisi.
Ukrainian authorities have so far reacted with confusion as to what happened, denying any knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the disappearance, which Veronika, a 32-year-old Ukrainian, said she believes was a kidnapping by Mossad, the Israeli security service.
She claims that Ukrainian authorities are lying and not only knew about the apparent seizing of her husband, but were complicit in the kidnapping.
Despite the denials of Ukrainian authorities, support for this theory was provided by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, a Gaza-based nongovernmental organization that quoted Dirar Abu Sisi in describing to a lawyer his abduction from the train and subsequent transfer to Israel.
Complicit or not, the disappearance raises questions about how a person can be spirited away from a supposedly democratic and independent country without going through any extradition procedures.
“How can I explain to my children that their father wasn’t killed by a bomb in Palestine but disappeared from a train in a democratic country?” Veronika said, speaking anxiously but confidently in accented Russian, a result of living the last 11 years in the Gaza Strip.
She met her husband, who is 10 years her senior, in Kharkiv in 1998, where she was studying violin at music school alongside classes at the agrarian university, while he was writing a thesis on management of power stations.
They married the same year, and Veronika converted to Islam, halted her studies and changed her surname from Romanova to Abu Sisi.
She now cuts a striking figure, her Muslim headscarf discordant with the surroundings of her parents’ two-room flat in the town of Kotsyubinske on the outskirts of Kyiv.
Veronika moved to the volatile Gaza Strip with her husband, who secured a well-paying job as a top manager at the power station because of his education in Ukraine. But after a devastating Israeli bombing campaign in 2008, which began just days after she had given birth to the couple’s sixth child, they decided to leave.
I gave birth to my child on Thursday and on the next Saturday a war started. I could not bear that any more. So we decided to resettle to my homeland.”
– Veronika Abu Sisi.
“I gave birth to my child on Thursday and on the next Saturday a war started. I could not bear that any more. So we decided to resettle to my homeland,” Veronika said, confessing that she regrets this decision now.
After being informed about the disappearance of her husband, Veronika, who was in Gaza at the time with her children, urgently came to Kyiv through Egypt. She crossed the border crawling though one of the tunnels often used by Palestinians to bypass the Egypt-Gaza Strip barrier built by Israel.
Her sister-in-law received a mysterious SMS from her husband’s cellphone, saying in Russian that he had to “go to ground” in Saudi Arabia for a while. “My husband doesn’t use such phrases,” Veronika said.
She appealed to Kyiv police, believing he had been abducted for ransom.
Then, out of the blue, Dirar called briefly on Feb. 27, saying he was in jail in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
How he got there isn’t clear, as a court-imposed gag order still prevents publication of what happened by Israeli media.
But a lawyer for the jailed man described how the prisoner described how he was seized from the train in Poltava by three men, two of whom were in uniform, before being whisked to Kyiv by car.
According to this account, Abu Sisi was received by six men who introduced themselves as Mossad agents who flew him by plane to Israel, with a stop-off at an unknown location after four or five hours.
His wife believes he was seized by Israelis because they want to know how the power plant works in order to disable it. Israeli authorities have refused to comment on the case.
It also remains unclear what he is charged with.
My husband is distant from politics. He is a technician and has only two passions in life – his work and his family.”
– Veronika Abu Sisi.
Rumors have swirled of connections with Islamic militant group Hamas, but his wife denied this.
“My husband is distant from politics. He is a technician and has only two passions in life – his work and his family,” she said.
Despite being told time and again that Ukrainian authorities don’t know what happened to her husband and are investigating, Veronika said she’ll continue to fight to find the truth.
“My heart is cold now as only this way I could help Dirar,” she said, adding she intends to take Ukraine, Israel and the Palestinian Authority to the European Court of Human Rights.
Now, she’s concerned for her children, staying with family in the Gaza Strip without either parent.
She said she now feels forced back there because of what has happened in Ukraine: “My state now makes me go back to the region I was trying to leave tooth-and-nail.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Oksana Grytsenko can be reached at [email protected].
