Nayla Assaf
Daily Star staff

Maya Saadeh woke up one morning last week only to find that her car was missing. Twenty-four hours later, an unidentified person called her on her mobile phone requesting that she pay him $3,000, “if you ever want to see your car again.”
Saadeh describes the days to come as like “something out of a movie.”
For four days, Saadeh received regular phone calls from her car’s “kidnappers” instructing her to pay.
“After very smooth bargaining on my behalf and a lot of stress control, I was able to lower the sum to LL1 million (about $650),” she told The Daily Star.
Saadeh, a 26-year-old lawyer, explained to her robbers that she had no money, and that after all her friends and acquaintances had chipped in, she was only able to gather LL1 million.
“Every now and then, he would give me a call to encourage me in my quest to gather the money,” she added, describing the situation as “surreal.”
When the thief finally settled for the LL1 million, Saadeh said she asked him if he was going to double-cross her and take both the money and the car, “his reply was: ‘Do you take me for a common thief?’”
“He seemed outraged that I would even hint such a thing and insisted that I come to his village someday to visit and see that he’s a man of honor,” she added, now able to laugh about the adventure.
Saadeh is not the only one to have had such an odd experience. Car kidnapping has become a regular practice here.
The robberies follow a pattern. The car disappears, 24-48 hour later a robber calls requesting a ransom, and if all goes well the car is almost always delivered as promised once the ransom is paid.
Jdeideh, Ain al-Remmaneh and Chiah, behind the Mar Michael Church, are the three usual delivery locations, while the payment is always done in the Bekaa.
The thieves, or at least those who make contact with the car owner, always identify
themselves as from Brital, a village in the qada of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley.
It is widely believed that Brital is “untouchable” because it is home to a famous renegade, former Hizbullah secretary-general Soubhi Toufeili, who was expelled from the party and is now an outlaw.
Saadeh, and other victims interviewed by The Daily Star, all said that when they approached the police, they were told that Brital is “off limits.”
“They literally said to me, if the meeting place is anywhere else, we’ll send 20 police troops with you, but we can’t do anything to help you if your thief is in Brital. It’s sort of a secret password,” she said.
Saadeh and Hadi Ashkar, another victim of the car
kidnappers, later took their complains to the ISF’s International Thefts Department, the authority in charge of such
cases, but the answer was still the same.
However, the ISF and the Interior Ministry deny that Brital is above the law.
A senior source at the ministry denied that there was a
political decision not to enter the village.
According to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the ISF has entered Brital on several occasions to apprehend thieves. He cited the latest highly publicized case when the ISF caught Tayfour earlier this year, a notorious car thief.
When asked why police officers did not react to several citizens’ complaints, he said that “those are individual cases, but history shows that we are reprimanding car thieves and car thefts have dropped by about 30 percent in the last couple of years.”
According to him, Lebanon has one of the lowest rates of car theft. “The fact that the thieves are trying to sell the car back to its owner is an indication that they are unable to sell it on the black market, because the ISF would spot it,” the source added.
Ultimately, Saadeh sent
a friend from the Bekaa to deliver the money while she picked up her car near Mar Michael church.
Two of her tires were punctured, one of them permanently, the battery was dead, her papers were missing and her
car had been hit in two different places.
Furthermore, Saadeh had to pay a LL100,000 fee to the ISF to cancel the car theft report.
“Not only did they (the police) refuse to protect me, and deny me my rights as a citizen, I had to pay extra just to release my car,” she complained.
Sadeh also said that before paying the ransom, she got word from friends that the cars are almost always parked in one of the three locations listed above and she informed the police about it.
“But they told me to look for it myself. They said that they would not look for it,” she added. According to her, when she asked them why, they dodged the question.
Saadeh toured the area unsuccessfully with friends on the day before her scheduled payment, passing near the spot there she picked up her car a day later.
“If they had sent police officers, they would have found it, but I could not search every corner of the region on my own,” she said.
Ashkar said that his caller did not even bother to use an unidentified number.
“I went to the ISF and showed them the number. I even made them listen to his voice on the telephone. They said they knew the voice and knew his identity, but could not do anything,” he added.
Ultimately, Ashkar also recovered his car, but like Saadeh, he said he “did it solo.”
“I don’t understand. Isn’t the state supposed to protect us and our interests?” he asked.
Ashkar said he even spoke with high-level authorities in the police department, “but his reply was the same.”