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| Mona and mother |
Good holiday Monday, South Bayview. A story that is both harrowing and heart-warming is breaking this lovely mid-summer day. It tells of a British mother who ventured all the way to Egypt to seize and return her three year old daughter Mona. The child had been abducted and taken to Egypt by her arab father. The mother, Alex Abou-El-Ella, 29, of Slough, Berkshire, enlisted the aid of a Scottish woman, now known as Dony al-Nahi, who has made a career of helping mothers of children who have been similarly spirited back to Arabia by their fathers. Ms al-Nahi is an author and is known in the media as “Jane Bond” for her exploits. The perilous rescue effort saw Ms. Abou-El-Ella dressing in full Muslim garb. She ignored warnings from the U-K Foreign Office that her attempts might go very wrong. The child had already been gone two years. With the help of Jane Bond and her trusted Egyptian contacts the mother found and laid in wait at a nursery in Cairo where Mona was enrolled. Early one morning, Mona appeared with an aunt and a boy just before 9 a.m. The desperate mother acted, leaping out the car and holding the long black dress so she could move, Ms. Abou-El-Ella felt herself walking faster and faster. “I saw Mona’s hand a few metres away from me,’ she said. ‘So I grabbed her, pulled her into my arms and the lady looked at my face but all she could see were my eyes.” Embracing her child tightly, she turned and fled as the other woman began to scream. Stumbling in her burka, the mother had only seconds to bundle the astonished child into the back seat of her car. There was further panic when she found the door locked. Jane Bond clambered over the seat to let her in. The confused child cried and referred to her aunt as “mother”. But after a few minutes of explanation she asked Alex Abou-El-Ella: “Are you my mum?” It was necessary to bribe officials at the airport but the mother and child are now back safe in the United Kingdom. As of this morning, it is 12 days since the pair arrived in their hometown of Slough. Mona has not seen her mother for two years so they have had much catching up to do. But as the picture shows, their natural relationship is healing well. Mailonline
