Latest / Crime Night / The Salmiya Freezer: How a Luxury Apartment, Fraud, and a Frozen Corpse Triggered an International Crisis

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The Salmiya Freezer: How a Luxury Apartment, Fraud, and a Frozen Corpse Triggered an International Crisis · Crime Night

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Okay, picture this. You step out of that intense ku
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: white heat right and into this heavy, almost refrigerated silence.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: An upscale apartment building in sell Mia.
• 0:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, sell mea known for those amazing cviews, just beautiful,
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: a place where wealth is so we just expected.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: But inside this particular apartment, forget the ocean breeze, just
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: this deep, really unsettling stillness. This was home once to
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: Nata and Mona, a couple seemingly all about success, image, money,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: and for the building owner, the silence. It was getting
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: really expensive, agonizingly said.
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: Right, three months had passed, no rent payment.
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: Nothing, and down below Nator's own car just sitting there
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: gathering dust, hasn't moved an in. You just know something's
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: wrong at that point totally, But you know property laws,
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: they take time. It took another three months, believe it
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: or not, just to get the legal go ahead to
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: reclaim the apartment.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: So six months of this this tension building, finally security
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: forces arrived with the landlord, and.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: What they find at the door is immediately strange.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: It wasn't just locked, It was like heavily secured, multiple locks,
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: complex ones, almost like someone wasn't trying to keep people
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: out but desperately sealing something in shit. So they finally
• 1:10
  Speaker 2: get the door open and the air hits them stale.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: The place is empty, looks like it has been touched
• 1:15
  Speaker 2: in a long long time. There were signs of life,
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: except for one thing cutting through that total silence, this
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: one single mechanical hum, A big deep freezer just running.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: In the corner, humming away. And that hum that was
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: the sound of pure horror. Because when they finally lifted
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: that lid, well, it wasn't frozen food inside. It was
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: a corpse, fully frozen, just terrify a statue almost in
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: this discovery. It wasn't just some local tragedy. This thing
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: blows up. It ends up involving four countries Kuwate, the Philippines, Syria,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: and Lebanon, a huge international mess.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: It's a story where this drive for status, this life
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: built on fraud, it just it collides head on with
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: a complete collapse of basic humanity.
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, so let's dig into the people involved. The couple
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: natter assof first.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, nater assof Lebanese and only son, apparently quite charismatic,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: really good salesman. We hear high end international brands clothes shoes,
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: that kind of thing.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: He was successful at it, very.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: But crucially, Nator seems to have believed his success was
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: purely down to him, his own smarts, his own hustle,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: nobody else.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: Right, which often masks something else, doesn't it. And apparently
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: he had a pretty difficult relationship with his parents. He
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: felt like they were trying to hold him back, you know.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: But there's this detail. He apparently hated being alone, but
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: most of his childhood with his aunt and cousins suggests
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: maybe a deep need for I don't know, validation connection
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: And maybe that's where Mona Hasson comes in exactly Syrian origin.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Three years younger. They meet and Kuwait, both working in
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: that same high end retail world, and they clicked destructively.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: So they shared these key traits, smart, ambitious, really focused
• 3:01
  Speaker 2: on money, and crucially maybe lacking let's say, strong moral
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: or religious anchors. Plus she'd been married before that becomes
• 3:09
  Speaker 2: a sticking point later.
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Okay, so how did their dynamic work?
• 3:13
  Speaker 2: Well, it seems Mona saw Nader his talent, but also
• 3:17
  Speaker 2: maybe that insecurity we talked about, she deliberately befriended him
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: and Boom takes control fast.
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: Wait, even though Nator had this strong, successful salesman persona.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: Apparently, yeah, under her influence, he just became weak compliant.
• 3:35
  Speaker 2: She set the direction he executed, even though he was
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: the sharp intellect guy.
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: Huh okay. So after about a year of this, they
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: decided to get married.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: Right but Nator's parents strongly disapproved. They didn't trust Mona,
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: especially with the previous marriage thing. They actually refused to
• 3:50
  Speaker 2: go to the wedding in Lebanon.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: Didn't stop them though, not at all.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: They get married, come right back to Kuwait and immediately
• 3:56
  Speaker 2: rent this super luxurious, very expensive apartment in Sawnia, the
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: one with the.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: View, and that expensive apartment, that whole facade that was
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: part of the plan, wasn't it.
• 4:05
  Speaker 2: Absolutely They needed that image of wealth and success why
• 4:08
  Speaker 2: to pull off the illegal schemes they were cooking up,
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: which we find out later involved complex fraud, bouncing bad
• 4:14
  Speaker 2: checks or works.
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: So their whole fancy life was basically built on lies.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: A house to cards.
• 4:20
  Speaker 2: Pretty much, and a house like that needs well, it
• 4:23
  Speaker 2: needs staff to keep up appearances. So a year into
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: the marriage, after their first child is born, they hire
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: a housemaid.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: This is Juana Dema fails.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: Yes, Juanadema files twenty five years old from the Philippines,
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: described as skillful, trustworthy, came from a simple background, family
• 4:40
  Speaker 2: relying on relatives working abroad in.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: The Gulf, and Nator becomes her official sponsor.
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: At her kafeel, which is key. That legal status made
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: her completely dependent on him. Her right to be in
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: Kuate to work. It was all tied to Natir.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: And that's where this beautiful apartment turns into something else entirely.
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: Immediately, the relationship between Mona and Juana hostile from the
• 5:00
  Speaker 2: get go. Mona starts fighting with her, insulting her, physically,
• 5:03
  Speaker 2: abusing her constantly.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Anna couldn't just leave.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: She was terrified Mona hell that could feel status over her.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: Heead constantly threats of losing her job, deportation, cutting off
• 5:12
  Speaker 2: the money she sent home to her family. It was
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: a trap. Awful, just awful, And we get this really
• 5:17
  Speaker 2: stark glimpse into NATO's own moral compass or lack thereof
• 5:21
  Speaker 2: way before the murder, his own mother comes to visit
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: Kuwait late twenty twelve, trying to reconnect. Maybe two days
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: into the visit, Mona picks a huge fight with her massive.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Argument and nat what does he do.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: Does he step in protect his mom mediate No, he
• 5:39
  Speaker 2: chooses Mona immediately drives his own mother to the airport
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: books are a take it back to Beirut, cuts off contact.
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: Wow, he literally kicked his own mother out within forty
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: eight hours to appease his wife.
• 5:49
  Speaker 2: Yes, it shows, I mean it shows a terrifying level
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: of choosing image, choosing Mona over basic decency over family.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: The rot was already deep.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's incredibly so. Wanna is stuck in this nightmare
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: for another whole year.
• 6:03
  Speaker 2: Until the final awful trigger. While she's cleaning, Wanta accidentally
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: break something, a small accessory of Mona's but apparently.
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Valuable, and Mona just snack.
• 6:11
  Speaker 2: Clearly flies into this blinding rage and the beating that
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: followed it was exceptionally severe. This was it the end.
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: Okay, the details that came out later from Nader's confession,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: they're just horrific.
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: He said, Mona used that broken piece of accessory, hit
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Wana hard on the head with it, knocked her unconscious.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: But she didn't stop there.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: No, even with Wanna unconscious, Moner kept beating her, torturing her.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable, and Natter comes home to.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: This finds this scene, and his first thought isn't guilt
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: or panic about wana his calculation. He's already in legal
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: hot water with all the fraud complaints stacking up. He
• 6:48
  Speaker 2: sees this massive assault, possibly moter charge, coming far worse
• 6:53
  Speaker 2: than fraud, and decides the quickest way out is to
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: eliminate the problem, eliminate Wanna.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: And this, this is where it gets almost incomprehensibly cold.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: Natter admitted it. He knew when it was still alive
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: when he made the decision, still alive. He binds her
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: hands and feet. She can't move, can't struggle. He empties
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: out that big deep freezer they.
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: Had, the one that was running on the police arrived.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: That's the one, empties it out and forces her inside alive.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: Oh my god, closes the lid, and then it's that.
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: They just carried on, lived their lives normally with their
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: child for a full year with her body in the.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Freezer, a full year, eating dinner, raising their kid, knowing
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: she's playing that right there in the kitchen.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: The level of your health of just normalizing that horror,
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: it's almost impossible to grasp. It's beyond criminal, it's monstrous.
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: And the cover up was immediate, wasn't it cynically fast?
• 7:48
  Speaker 2: Just two days after murdering her, Nator goes to the
• 7:51
  Speaker 2: police station files a missing person report, says Wanna.
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: Ran away, making her officially an absconder, someone the police
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: should arrest if they find.
• 7:59
  Speaker 2: Her exactly, and because Wana only called home maybe once
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: or twice a year, her family had no immediate reason
• 8:06
  Speaker 2: to worry. She just vanished as far as they knew.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So they get away with it for a year.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: For a year, but by late twenty fifteen, their other
• 8:14
  Speaker 2: crimes start catching out. The fraud complaints, the bad checks,
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: it's getting too hot, ten to run. Suddenly they flee kuwait.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: This is about three months before the landlord finally gets
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: access and the body is found. They go to Lebanon first,
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: then into Syria.
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: And then the discovery the freezer.
• 8:28
  Speaker 2: The body forensics takes over, no doubt who it is,
• 8:31
  Speaker 2: fingerprints match Wanna.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: Fails, and the evidence of torture, the head.
• 8:35
  Speaker 2: Wound all there clear signs of torture, severe blow to
• 8:39
  Speaker 2: the head with something sharp, consistent with the broken accessory
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: Nader mentioned.
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: But the actual cause of death that's the clincher.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: The official cause of death was freezing hypothermia.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: Which confirms Nator's story. She was alive when he put
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: her in there, bound and helpless. The cold killed her exactly.
• 8:57
  Speaker 2: The freezer was the murder weapon.
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: So now so Whitey authorities know what happened, who did it,
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: and roughly win time for the manhunt.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: Right, they contact Inner Poll immediately. But it's complicated, right
• 9:08
  Speaker 2: the suspects cross borders.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Syria and Lebanon involved, now yep.
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: Eventually Nator is picked up in Syria deported back to Lebanon.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: Mona is also arrested in Syria.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: But the discovery itself, the news getting out, that caused waves, didn't.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: It huge waves? A Kafil the sponsor, the person responsible
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: for her murdering his Philippina made and freezing her body.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: It triggered an immediate major diplomatic crisis between the Philippines
• 9:32
  Speaker 2: and Kuwait. Understandably, Kuwait sentences nat and Mona to death
• 9:36
  Speaker 2: in absentia, but then the President of the Philippines formally
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: demands they be extradited back to the Philippines to face
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: trial there.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: So you have this massive international legal and diplomatic fight brewing.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: A real crisis. Yeah, over this horrific crime and the
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: underlying issues with labor sponsorship systems. It took a lot
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: of work behind the scenes to eventually navigate that.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's just process this. For living for a year
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: with that secret, raising a child next to a freezer
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: containing the person you murdered, it's a.
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: Level of depravity that's hard to fathom, the sheer psychological
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: effort to just normalize that day in day out.
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: It really speaks to that idea of moral decay you mentioned,
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: when ambition is purely for self interest, for money, for.
• 10:19
  Speaker 2: Image, exactly their intelligence, their ambition. It wasn't grounded in
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: any basic humanity. It was all tied to this fraudulent lifestyle,
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: this expensive apartment facade.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: And when Wana's life threatened to expose.
• 10:30
  Speaker 2: That lie, her life became disposable, just another problem to
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: be eliminated, like a bounce check. They chose the lie,
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: the status over a human being.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: Okay, but then there's this this really weird, chilling PostScript
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: about the apartment itself.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is wild. So the person who originally
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: shared this story, they had a friend, okay, who actually
• 10:53
  Speaker 2: rented that same luxury apartment in Selmaya. After everything after
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: the body was found, after the case.
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: Blew up, no way, why how.
• 11:00
  Speaker 2: Apparently they got an unbelievable deal on the rent, like
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: crazy low, a total skial because well you can.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: Imagine why, right, nobody wanted it.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: So this friend lives there for over a year, completely
• 11:13
  Speaker 2: unaware of the specifics, just knows it's chief oblivious until
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: one day he's at a local barber shop nearby, mentions
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: his address and the barber just casually says, what, you're
• 11:23
  Speaker 2: living in Nator's apartment, you know, the one where nobody
• 11:25
  Speaker 2: stays because of the corpse and the freezer.
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: Oh my god, can you imagine hearing that?
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: Right, The friend was, needless to say, horrified found out
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: the whole dark history he'd literally been living inside. He
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: moved out immediately.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: I don't blame him. Wow. So thinking about this whole thing,
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: Nator mona Wana, it starts with this desperate need for status,
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: for the appearance of success.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: Well it's on lies, fraud and.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: Ends in this horrific crime, a diplomatic crisis, and an
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: apartment that basically becomes this haunted monument to their failure.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it really makes you think, doesn't it. But the
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: facades people build the cost of ambition when it's completely
• 12:04
  Speaker 2: cut off from any sense of yeah, well being human.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: How much is the environment the pressure, and how much
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: is just an internal choice to abandon everything decent. It's
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: it's a really haunting thought to leave you with