A 25-year-old Egyptian-American traveled to Nepal to volunteer after the earthquake. She found a friendly host on Couchsurfing.com. She was never heard from again.
BY JOSHUA HAMMER
Foreign Policy
In 2011, Gizmodo published an article titled, “How to Couchsurf and Not Get Killed.” The piece, topped by a still from the horror flick Hostel, contained tips for self-preservation: Avoid posting “racy” photos online, feel out a host by meeting at a café ahead of time, and send contact information to someone who will notice if you disappear. “Fortunately, you can now crash on a person’s sofa using an online travel network,” the article noted. “Unfortunately, that person might be a batshit-crazy rapist.”
Despite its jesting tone, the piece was responding to real-life events. Two years prior, Abdelali Nachet, a 34-year-old Moroccan émigré in Leeds, England, had used Couchsurfing to lure a 29-year-old woman to his home. According to prosecutors, Nachet pushed her down on his bed, raped her twice, and forced her to take a bath to eliminate forensic evidence. Then he let her go, apparently believing she wouldn’t talk or that, if she did, he could argue the sex was consensual. Instead, after the victim went to police, Nachet was convicted of rape and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
That assault wasn’t an isolated incident. Dino Maglio, a former police officer in Padua, Italy, who used the nickname “Leonardo” on his Couchsurfing profile, opened his home to more than a dozen female travelers in 2013 and 2014, served them drugged tea or wine, and raped them, according to police. A 20-year-old American victim told journalists at the Investigative Reporting Project Italy, which collected statements from many of Maglio’s accusers, that she had stayed with him because, “I checked his profile. It was long and detailed.… It said he was a police officer. He looked like a nice guy.” Maglio was convicted in April 2015. (Other lodging sites aren’t immune to misuse: In October 2011, for instance, Pablo Cesar Cordoba Riascos, a 34-year-old Airbnb host, raped two women staying at his home in Barcelona, Spain. He’s now serving 11 years behind bars.)
Like most businesses in today’s sharing economy, Couchsurfing takes an enter-at-your-own-risk approach. It offers a verification process — for $20 per year — that confirms a user’s valid phone number or address, indicated by a green check mark on the person’s profile. Yet it also warns members in a disclaimer that it “has no responsibility or liability with respect to … any relations whatsoever between you and any other member.” Couchsurfing encourages users to report “anyone through our services who you feel is acting or has acted inappropriately.” It emphasizes, however, “[W]e are not obligated to take any action.”
In the United States, the legal heft of this sort of language is still being assessed. Last November, an article in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal described sharing websites as falling into a gray area between “purely passive message boards” and “direct service providers.” Taking advantage of this space, companies have managed to stave off most civil actions. An Illinois court held in 2009 that Craigslist is not legally responsible for users’ conduct, including soliciting sex, because the site is an “interactive computer service” that merely publishes information generated by outsider providers. In 2014, a California family sued Uber for wrongful death after one of the company’s drivers struck and killed their 6-year-old daughter. In court documents, Uber argued that it doesn’t provide a service; it only helps “riders to connect with … a range of independent transportation providers” and so cannot be held liable for drivers’ actions. (Uber settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.)
In some instances, companies have gone so far as to delay help from reaching people in distress. Last year, Jacob Lopez, a 19-year-old American tourist, rented a room in Madrid from an Airbnb host who allegedly held him captive and assaulted him. Lopez managed to text his mother in Massachusetts, and she called Airbnb, which wouldn’t release the host’s address or contact law enforcement. Lopez eventually escaped, after which an Airbnb representative acknowledged to Boston.com that “one incident is too many, and while no industry has a 100 percent safety record, that’s what we strive for.” The company has said it will ensure that its phone operators call police when they suspect a crime is in progress.
Similarly, during Maglio’s trial in 2015, Jennifer Billock, Couchsurfing’s CEO, told the Guardian that her company was “evolving our tools and processes to find and halt abusers of the system.” It isn’t clear what steps were taken, if any, before Yehia stayed with Paudel in Nepal seven months later. Couchsurfing declined to divulge Yehia’s data to family and friends, citing U.S. privacy law and company policy.
A relative (who wished not to be named or interviewed for this article) contacted Billock directly by email on Aug. 31. “The embassy reached out to CS but didn’t get much help,” the relative wrote. “I get the whole privacy thing but there has to be a way around it…. It shouldn’t be this hard when a life is at stake.”
On the morning of Sept. 2, 2015, two CIB agents knocked on Paudel’s door. He let them in and served them tea. They told him they knew about the iPhone. Paudel explained that Yehia had left it charging in a wall socket, and he hadn’t noticed it until she was gone. After a few days of not hearing from her, he had decided to keep it. A local shopkeeper had helped him put in a SIM card, but he hadn’t been able to break the phone’s security code.
Did he have the iPhone now? No, Paudel said, it had dropped through a hole in his pocket one day.
Unsatisfied by his answers, the police arrested Paudel for theft. In an interrogation room at Pokhara’s police headquarters, officers grilled him about possible foul play. Initially, Paudel stuck to his story. “He was not accepting all these things” he was being accused of, recalls Bhishma Humagain, a CIB inspector. “He was saying, ‘I just met Dahlia.… I don’t know where she went.’” The police gave him a polygraph test, which Humagain says Paudel failed. As they pressed him further, Paudel cracked.
“He told me,” Humagain says, “‘I threw her from the bridge.’”
Paudel allegedly told police that he and Yehia had gone walking along the Seti River after dark on Aug. 6. While crossing a suspension footbridge over the river, they had begun chasing each other playfully, and he accidentally had knocked her over the edge of the span. But the police found his story implausible. The bridge had guardrails and fencing, and it would take considerable effort to shove someone over. So the officers kept questioning Paudel. He was lying, they told him, and he had to admit what really happened.
After two days, says Ram Adhikari of the Pokhara police, Paudel confessed that Yehia had never made it out of his apartment — at least not alive.
On her second night staying with him, he had risen from his bed, crept up to Yehia while she slept, raised a hammer, and smashed her forehead twice. He then picked up a heavy wooden bar, used to lock his apartment door from the inside, and hit her three more times. Within a few minutes, Yehia was dead.
Police say Paudel admitted that he stuffed her corpse into a large burlap sack used for storing rice, tied it to the back of his motorbike, and rode a few hundred yards to a river overlook. He heaved the body, along with Yehia’s backpack, into what had become a swirling torrent at the height of Nepal’s monsoon season. Paudel also allegedly confessed to wiping down his walls and floor, cramming bloody bedsheets into a bag with the remainder of Yehia’s belongings, and dumping them with the murder weapons in brush along the riverbank. Police suspect that he kept the iPhone, a valuable item in Nepal, and discarded it only when the U.S. Embassy paid him a visit.
The day after the confession, police dogs obtained Yehia’s scent from Paudel’s apartment and followed it down a road to the Seti. In thick vegetation, the canines found a pair of black pants, a rope, and a bedcover that, according to police, Paudel acknowledged he had used to tie Yehia’s body to his motorbike. Farther down the road, they retrieved other items: a water bottle, a baseball cap, a blouse, and linens stained with what appeared to be blood.
As Paudel stood watching next to a police van, a crowd of curious onlookers gathered. Word spread that he had killed a young American woman. “He was ashamed, he bent his head, he covered his head with his jacket,” recalls Adhikari, who was at the scene. “These people were saying, ‘Burn him alive. Throw him into the river.’”
The next morning, as two officers escorted Paudel to a toilet, which required walking across the roof of the police station, he reportedly broke free, hurled himself off the edge of the building, and fell three stories. “He wanted to commit suicide,” Adhikari says. “[At first,] we were thinking, ‘It’s better to let him die here.’ But then we did everything we could [to save him].” The fall shattered Paudel’s left leg and tore a deep gash in his scalp. He was taken unconscious to a Pokhara hospital, where he remained for 40 days.
After his release, according to police, Paudel reiterated his guilt before a judge in a small chamber of Pokhara’s colonial-era courthouse. Surrounded by law enforcement, with only one distant relative present, he described in graphic detail how he had killed Yehia. He was charged with robbery, kidnapping, and murder and sent behind bars to await trial.
It seemed that might punctuate the end of the story. Questions about Yehia’s disappearance, however, were about to get more complicated.
Police hunted for forensic proof of a grisly homicide in Paudel’s apartment. Investigators searched for blood with infrared lights and a chemical spray that reacts with the iron in hemoglobin. Trace amounts were found and sent to the government’s forensic lab in Kathmandu, Humagain says. Police also used a raft and ropes to search the Seti for Yehia’s body.
In late September, they found a badly decomposed corpse. It belonged to a woman “between 25 and 27 years old,” according to Humagain. The body was sent off for analysis; Humagain says an initial “autopsy showed that there was an injury on the skull.”
What Paudel’s motive might have been became a matter of dispute. Adhikari says the suspect was building a house in the village where he grew up and “was burdened with debts.” Paudel had seen Yehia withdraw cash from an ATM and knew she had worked in earthquake relief; maybe he thought she was carrying aid funds, Adhikari conjectures.
Humagain suggests that Paudel may have sexually assaulted Yehia and killed her to cover up the crime. “I asked him this question, and he denied it,” the CIB inspector says. “But denying doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen.”
After interviewing Paudel, his family, and his neighbors, Humagain characterizes the suspect as “a quarreling man. When he doesn’t like anything, he reacts with anger.” Paudel was married once but got divorced. (Neither Paudel’s ex-wife nor his girlfriend at the time of Yehia’s disappearance could be reached for comment.) Humagain says that almost everyone in Paudel’s life deserted him after his arrest: “When he stayed in the hospital for 40 days alone, neither of his parents ever came there. Not once.”
Family members either couldn’t be reached for comment or declined to speak, except for Baburam Paudel, the distant relative — Narayan Paudel refers to him as an “uncle” — who attended the court hearing. A retired civil servant with a fringe of gray hair, Baburam Paudel says he initially thought his nephew might have killed Yehia because he has “psychological problems” and “a habit of not accepting criticisms.… [H]e would argue back, fight.” Baburam Paudel confirms that his nephew was under financial stress and also had been involved in domestic altercations with his ex-wife. “The police came to the house,” he says. “There was some slapping, some quarrels.”
Yet he ruled out Paudel’s guilt after visiting him in the hospital. He implored his nephew to tell the truth. “I told him, ‘If you have killed, in 10 or 15 years you can get out of jail and start a good life even after that,’” Baburam Paudel recalls. But instead of admitting to murder, his nephew proclaimed he had been “beaten, threatened, [and] tortured” into confessing.
Abusing suspects has long been standard procedure in Nepal. A 2006 report by the U.N. special rapporteur on torture stated that “[t]orture is systematically practiced by the police, armed police, and Royal Nepalese Army.” More recently, according to Amnesty International’s 2015-2016 annual report on Nepal, “Torture and other ill-treatment by police continued, particularly during pre-trial detention, to extract confessions and intimidate individuals.” Baburam Paudel is convinced that the police, anxious to find a suspect in the disappearance of an American, used and abused his nephew as a scapegoat.
A friend of Paudel’s also believes he is innocent. Casper Mayland, a Danish development consultant who traveled to Nepal in 2011 to conduct anthropology fieldwork, became “close” to Paudel over about six months in Pokhara. They were later in touch remotely up until Paudel’s arrest. “He was goofy, really friendly, a little chubby, full of life and happiness,” Mayland says. Once, Paudel tried to spend an entire month’s salary to throw Mayland a birthday party, but his friend refused the offer. “He’s not a poor guy scraping the bottom of society,” Mayland says. “He wouldn’t steal to get an iPhone.” Mayland suspects that Paudel was tortured.
Reached on Skype in Portugal, Sofia Palma, the young woman who once glowingly reviewed Paudel on Couchsurfing, describes her friend as “kind” and “not an extroverted person; he was calm.” Palma clarifies, however, that she never spent a night in Paudel’s apartment. She reviewed him based only on social interactions they had around Pokhara. “I was 20, naïve. I wrote it out of a sense of adventure,” she says. As to whether Paudel could have committed murder, “It makes no sense, according to the person I met,” Palma says. “But it was five years ago.”
Klugerman initially distrusted the police’s version of events because certain parts of the case didn’t seem to add up. Why did Paudel tell the police two versions of the crime? And was the prospect of stealing cash and an iPhone really enough for him to beat a defenseless woman to death in her sleep?
Yet other details made him suspicious of Paudel. The Couchsurfing host had expressed “little interest” in Yehia’s whereabouts in his initial email to Klugerman. Moreover, it seemed improbable that Yehia would have left her iPhone at the apartment. “In Nepal, the cell phone is your lifeline,” Klugerman says. Then, there were items of Yehia’s that police found in Paudel’s apartment: a copy of Fahrenheit 451 and a blank diary with a picture of a paintbrush on the cover, which Klugerman had helped Yehia pick out before her trip. (According to police, Yehia’s parents, who remained in Michigan, also saw photos of the clothes found by the river and identified them as probably belonging to their daughter.)
Most convincing, though, was Paudel himself. Over dinner one winter night in Kathmandu, where he was spending a few weeks following up on the investigation, Klugerman, a rangy, bearded 29-year-old, told me about visiting Paudel in jail. He was shaken by the suspect’s “insistence that none of what had happened was his fault. Even keeping the iPhone was … ‘normal.’”
“He claimed,” Klugerman added, “that Dahlia had brought this misfortune on him.”
In late February, I visited Paudel myself. The Pokhara prison compound is surrounded by barbed wire and contains white concrete buildings alongside a scruffy field where cows graze. Visitors talk to inmates in a courtyard through rusty, barred windows covered with chicken wire.
Paudel hobbled out of his cellblock on crutches; his leg was still in a cast. Wearing a blue warm-up jacket, black track pants, and sandals, he lowered himself onto a bench and began to talk.
He loved meeting people through Couchsurfing, Paudel said, and his time with Yehia was “nice.” They had talked each night about her days spent exploring Pokhara. Then, unprompted, Paudel told me, “But we never shared a bed. We had no sort of intercourse.” (Two policemen had been listening from a few yards away. Three more joined them, and the group inched closer to where Paudel and I sat.)
Paudel said he’d been horrified to learn of Yehia’s disappearance: “I was sad.… She was my friend.” When the police first questioned him, they were polite; that changed, he said, once they detained him. “They cuffed my hands behind me, locked my feet, they beat me,” Paudel claimed. “They said, ‘You need to tell the truth. Where is she?’ I said, ‘Dear sir, I am telling you the truth. If you think I am lying, then kill me. I cannot bear this punishment.’ They used electric shocks on my feet, hands, and neck. They kicked me in my penis.”
After a few hours, he wanted the pain to stop. “So I said, ‘I killed her,’” Paudel recalled. “I didn’t think I’d go to prison.” When the police refused to accept his first confession about pushing Yehia from the bridge, he told me that he “changed it into something they would believe.”
Paudel was earnest and articulate, with an answer for every question. The clothes and linens recovered by the river? A frame job by the cops. The possible bloodstains in his apartment? He knew nothing about them. The leap from the roof? The police had pushed him.
Prison is “hell,” Paudel said. If convicted at trial, which was ongoing at press time, “I will be ready to kill myself.” (According to police, he faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.)
When the police signaled the end of the interview, I stood and shook Paudel’s hand. Then, I asked him directly whether he had killed Yehia. A pained expression flashed across his face.
“Oh, my God. I could not have done that,” Paudel said, looking me in the eye. “She went her way. I went my way. I just hope that she will soon be with her parents and contact me. I just hope that God is protecting her.”
The truth, it seemed, was immersed in the stains from Paudel’s apartment and in the woman’s body recovered from the Seti. Nepalese police initially told me the FBI had the evidence in the United States; they didn’t know why an analysis was taking so long. The FBI, however, wrote in an email that it “cannot comment on an ongoing Nepalese investigation” and “any examination results would be provided by the Nepalese.” It also said the “FBI Laboratory does not identify remains” and “does not conduct blood stain pattern analysis.”
In a follow-up exchange, a Nepalese police representative clarified that the evidence is still in Kathmandu’s forensic lab. (Foreign donors gave some $850,000 two years ago for the government to install a state-of-the-art facility; its employees were trained in India and the United States.) He added that “for DNA verification Mothers [sic] DNA record was provided.” Klugerman confirms that Yehia’s family was asked to provide DNA samples — but only in March, more than six months after the investigation began. As for American involvement, the representative wrote that the Kathmandu lab was “also seeking cooperation from FBI … and response of FBI is excellent.”
Finally, in early May, police got word that the body found in the Seti was not Yehia’s. The news came as a surprise to officers who’d been convinced it was her. Additional results, though, seemed to confirm their suspicions: The blood evidence was a match.
The DNA and his confession could be enough to convict Paudel. If so, Yehia’s fate may place the sharing economy under renewed scrutiny. “The guy’s reviews were beyond glowing,” Klugerman says. “There’s not much more that you can really ask.” In an email sent after Paudel was arrested, Billock, Couchsurfing’s CEO, offered condolences to Klugerman, said her company was “in active communication” with U.S. authorities, and noted that “our engineering team is working … on a memorialized version of [Yehia’s] profile.”
As a matter of emotion, the DNA seems likely to deprive Yehia’s loved ones of closure. Meager bloodstains may be the last vestiges of her existence. With her body still missing, the young woman’s vanishing may remain painfully complete.
Update, July 6, 2016: In early July, after the publication of this story in the July/August issue of FP magazine, a court in Nepal convicted Narayan Paudel of murdering Dahlia Yehia, according to media reports. He was sentenced to life in prison.
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