The 30-second kidnapping — and a family’s years-long fight for the truth

ADEN, Yemen — The ambush spot was good: Single-lane street, just enough space to overtake. Few exits, easily controlled. Hidden from the highway by high buildings lining either side.

So when the strike team trailed Lt. Col. Ali Ashaal into this quiet neighborhood on the western edge of Aden, they were ready. A Toyota Voxy minivan with tinted windows slid behind Ashaal’s SUV, then gave a burst of speed to zoom ahead and block his path.

The gunmen sprinted out, guns at the ready, before their car fully stopped. They grabbed Ashaal — he appeared too surprised to resist — and shoved him into the Voxy while another jumped behind the wheel of his SUV. A moment later, both vehicles drove off at a stately pace, as if nothing had happened.

The whole thing was done in 30 seconds.

It was June 12, 2024, and though his family didn’t know it yet, Ashaal had joined the ranks of Yemen’s disappeared.

The abductions started a little over a decade ago. Kidnapping had occurred before the civil war, but the scale and nature of it changed dramatically after 2014, when Yemen when Yemen in effect fractured under rival governments.

Some disappearances came with ransom demands. But in the south, militias backed by the United Arab Emirates launched anti-terrorism dragnets to root out militants from Al Qaeda, Islamic State or the Islah party, Yemen’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Critics allege the abductions were often motivated more by political score-settling and extortion by the UAE-supported governing authority in southern Yemen, the Southern Transitional Council, or STC.

Across the region, thousands disappeared. In Aden alone, the count is in the hundreds — most of them swallowed by a secret prison network managed by the UAE and its affiliated forces, where torture, beatings and abuse were common, according to the Yemeni government, human rights organizations and the United Nations.

For the families of the disappeared, the festering grief from not knowing the fate of a son, brother or father was compounded by threats from authorities displeased with anyone scrutinizing their behavior.

People were often too afraid to speak up about a missing loved one. But Ashaal’s family, part of a powerful tribe in south Yemen, was the rare case where the victims refused to be silent.

And they were determined to find him.

Around 1 a.m., seven hours after Ashaal failed to return home, a cousin and brother-in-law contacted friends, hospitals and the various security headquarters in Aden. No luck.

By the next morning, they learned from a friend that Ashaal had been scheduled to meet with Sameeh Al-Nourji, a business acquaintance involved in real estate on behalf of top figures in Aden’s Counter-Terrorism Unit, which is supported by the UAE.

It was the first hint of who might be behind Ashaal’s disappearance.

Al-Nourji, who seemed eager to cooperate, led the family to the street corner where he met Ashaal. But the police found discrepancies in his story: He claimed to have arrived after Ashaal, but local surveillance video showed him waiting for Ashaal, then trailing him in another vehicle when Ashaal drove off.

Suspecting Al-Nourji of trying to misdirect them, the police held him for questioning.

Meanwhile, investigators and family members fanned out through Aden to collect recordings from other security cameras. That allowed them to retrace Ashaal’s SUV to the street where the Voxy blocked his escape.

“When we saw the Voxy on camera, we knew it had to be a security service. They’re the ones who use those type of vans,” said Raafat Al-Saadi, Ashaal’s cousin.

“It was a shock when I watched it, to see the authorities dare to go after an officer.”

Despite those breakthroughs, there were signs the police were slow-rolling the investigation.

The family discovered that Al-Nourji had been released two days after he was detained, on orders of Yusran Al-Maqtari, the head of the Counter-Terrorism Unit, who said he would guarantee Al-Nourji’s appearance when the police required it.

Instead, both of them, along with other associates, disappeared the next day, presumably escaping to the UAE, reports said.

“How were these people allowed to leave Aden?” Al-Saadi said. “Did they leave by air or by sea? And where did they go? No one gave us answers.”

The motive for taking Ashaal was also unclear. A well-regarded battalion commander in Yemen’s armed forces, Ashaal, then 42, worked a sideline in real estate with a partner. Al-Saadi described him as “a man with influence,” but said that he used it to resolve tribal disputes and stayed away from politics.

The kidnapping of Ali Ashaal occurred in the Aden, Yemen, an ancient port city on the southwestern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

(Uncredited / Associated Press)

One reason for targeting Ashaal could have been run-of-the-mill avarice. He was in charge of a large base, comprising many acres that someone hoped to take over as a real estate investment. In this telling, Ashaal refused to relinquish control of the base to Aden authorities, leading a rival to dispose of him.

The family pressed on with the search. Rather than wait for investigators, they called used their police connections to obtain more security camera recordings.

“We worked like a security service,” Al-Saadi recalled, explaining how 20 relatives formed three teams to collect whatever images and information they could.

Sitting in his home with other family members and a reporter, Al-Saadi brought out hard drives, USB sticks and a laptop with dozens of files from security cameras.

With him was 35-year-old Hani, a technically minded cousin who spearheaded the effort to understand how the abduction took place, and who gave only his first name to avoid reprisals.

It took roughly two weeks of tedious work, sifting through hours of grainy recordings.

By the end of it, Hani had identified a dilapidated blue microbus, a nondescript sedan and an Inkas armored truck that had been following Ashaal’s movements in the days before the operation and apparently ran surveillance for the strike team when it nabbed Ashaal. He also tracked down Ashaal’s SUV to a neighborhood that includes a prison for the security services.

“I memorized every single vehicle in those videos,” he said, a note of pride in his voice as he double-clicked on a file and pointed at the Voxy.

“They tried to mask their movements by changing the mirrors and modifying the car’s trim to change its appearance,” he said. “But we still found them.”

Two weeks after Ashaal’s kidnapping, Hani handed the recording and his analysis to authorities. Throughout that time, Ashaal’s tribe had mobilized, organizing protests with hundreds of people in Aden’s main square, and coordinating with other tribes to close roads into Aden. They gave the STC until August to produce their clansman.

The threat appeared to have an effect: Police raided a home near where Ashaal’s SUV was found, arresting 32 people and scooping up evidence implicating Al-Maqtari and others in questionable real estate deals that often involved coercing people to give up property.

One day before the tribe’s deadline, Aden’s security chief gave a news conference admitting members of the Counter-Terrorism Unit — including Al-Maqtari — and other security services orchestrated the disappearance. He directed the country’s international police liaison to coordinate with Interpol to hunt down the accused abroad.

But the family came to see those moves as distractions.

Of the 32 apprehended, only two were convicted, Al-Saadi said, and they were little more than foot soldiers to masterminds of the operation who had already escaped. The other 30 were set free.

The office charged with contacting Interpol didn’t follow through because of a procedural issue.

Meanwhile, Al-Maqtari released a statement denying his involvement. Still, he didn’t return to face his accusers, and the UAE appeared to have little inclination to extradite him, said Ahmad Hadi, 48, a physician who is Ashaal’s brother-in-law.

“This is a security apparatus that took someone away and disappeared them. Can we ask them to investigate that disappearance?” Hadi said.

“We’re dealing with gangsters, mafiosi who collude together. This was at all levels: the police, the judiciary, the government. Everyone,” he said.

The family continued its fight to determine Ashaal’s fate. Al-Saadi and others regularly organized more protests in Aden, despite the STC employing both carrot and stick, reassuring Al-Saadi that Ashaal would be found and to be patient, while dispatching riot police to disperse Ashaal-related gatherings and arresting participants.

Many Yemeni families had given up on finding loved ones, but a glimmer of hope recently came from an unlikely source — a confrontation in February between Saudi Arabia and the STC.

Yemeni soldiers in Sanaa stand by a building and car destroyed in Saudi airstrikes, during an event on March 26 to commemorate the anniversary of the Saudi-led intervention in their country.

(Mohammed Huwais / AFP via Getty Images)

After the STC tried to seize more Yemeni territory, Saudi leaders launched airstrikes to push it back and forced the group’s leaders to declare its dissolution.

It was the opening the families of the disappeared had been waiting for.

“Before, when I raised the issue of detainees with the coalition, I was accused of exaggerating. But with the Emirates and Saudi Arabia falling out, the Saudis themselves are talking about it,” said Arwa Fadhl, a coordinator with the Abductees’ Mothers Assn., a detainee advocacy group.

She added that many families had been too afraid to speak out while the STC and the UAE were in charge.

“Now, we’re getting phone calls every day, with people asking me, ‘Where are our family members? Where did they take them?’ That includes families whose relatives disappeared years ago but are only reporting it now,” she said.

Fadhl and others have been pushing the Yemeni government to allow rights groups and families to enter prisons and search for their loved ones.

The expectation after the STC’s collapse was that prisons in Aden would be opened, especially after Yemen’s president ordered the closure of all illegal prisons and the release of what he described as “unlawfully held” detainees.

But that hasn’t happened, and attempts by the new authorities to enter STC-affiliated detention facilities in the south have been met by resistance, said Tawfik Alhamidi, head of the Geneva-based SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties.

“Many of the security groups that committed these violations still retain power and control their detention facilities,” he said.

Since the STC’s ouster, Ashaal’s family has intensified pressure on authorities to bring the accused to justice. In January, Yemen’s Interior Ministry re-upped a request to its Emirati counterpart to apprehend Al-Maqtari and his associates. There has been no response so far.

Al-Saadi, Ashaal’s cousin, knows it’s unlikely that Ashaal is alive. But he demands to know either way.

“We heard rumors they killed him. OK, it happens. But where is the corpse? You wanted to execute him, inform us. But to disappear him …,” he said, frustration growing in his voice as it trailed off.

Hadi, the brother-in-law, continued Al-Saadi’s thought.

“We won’t stop,” he said. “Even if the sky falls on us, we’re going to find out what happens.”