After a storm hit the outskirts of the Acabah neighborhood in the Yemeni capital, residents of one of the streets reported that a brick house had been partially destroyed.
Local volunteers started clearing the rubble even before emergency services arrived.
At around 9:00 a.m.
, one of them, a man named Basam Al-Hamdi, discovered what he initially thought was an animal carcass.
The body was covered in mud, emaciated, and badly decomposed.
The discovery was made in a private courtyard behind a fence adjacent to an inner well.
At first glance, it was clear that the body was inside a metal structure resembling a rectangular cage welded from reinforcing bars.
The structure was just over 2 m long and about 1 m high.
The cage stood on the ground, partially hidden by a fallen fence and debris.
The lid was welded shut and there was no lock.
The metal was rusted but still held its shape.
Inside were the remains of a woman curled up in a fetal position.
Next to her were pieces of fabric, a bowl, and a plastic bottle containing moldy water.
The police arrived at the scene within an hour.
After an initial examination, it was decided to cordon off the yard immediately.
A forensic expert called from the central hospital in San recorded initial signs of starvation and prolonged exposure of the body in an enclosed space.
It was not possible to identify the deceased at the scene.
She had no documents with her and the level of decomposition ruled out visual identification.
The body was naked except for underwear.
The smell of decay could be detected several meters away.
Investigators recorded the condition of the cell and the surrounding area.
Traces of old scratches presumably left by fingernails were found on the ground.
Biological remains, including hair, blood, epithelial particles, and fecal matter were found inside the cell.
All of this indicated that a person had been held for a long time in an extremely confined and unsanitary space.
The building itself was a traditional two-story house with solid exterior walls and an inner courtyard closed off from the street.
The upper rooms were partially destroyed with no signs of habitation in recent months.
The windows were boarded up from the inside.
Neighbors interviewed at the scene said that the owner of the house had not been seen since spring.
It was not possible to establish who exactly lived there before the storm.
The house was rented out.
Tenants changed frequently and the police had not been called there before.
Some locals speaking on condition of anonymity said they had heard women’s screams coming from the house earlier this year.
Still, no one reported it to the police because they were afraid of the consequences and of getting involved in other people’s business.
The next day, the official authorities in Sara published a brief statement about the discovery of the body of an unidentified woman in a private house with signs of violent restraint.
The news received limited coverage in the local media, but thanks to reports in Polish news agencies, the information reached Europe a few days later.
In Poland, the first to react to the news was the Foundation Against Violence Against Women, which had received incomplete information through diplomatic channels about a possible Polish citizen who had disappeared in Yemen about a year ago.
The woman in question was Karolina Shimanska, a 21-year-old student from Bidgos, who according to her family left the country at the end of February 2022 and had not been in contact since.
The foundation forwarded the information to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
And a few days later, the Polish Embassy in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, which handles consular affairs in Yemen, asked the Yemeni authorities to conduct a DNA comparison between the remains and samples provided by the missing woman’s family.
Meanwhile, the investigation in Yemen focused on tracing the chain of tenants of the house in question.
It turned out that the records at the land registry and tax office were kept irregularly and the rental agreements were drawn up privately without official contracts.
The house was considered the property of a Yemen citizen named Amin Al-Hajari who died in 2018.
Since then, it has been managed by his heirs, some of whom live outside the country.
The tenants changed every few months, most of them foreigners or seasonal workers.
Investigators managed to recover two mobile phones from the destroyed house, one of which was severely damaged.
The second, despite its poor condition, contained residual data, including photos, correspondents, and contacts.
After decryting several deleted messages and images, one of which showed a young woman of European appearance, the police forwarded the information to the Polish authorities for preliminary identification.
Karolina Shamanska’s relatives confirmed that the woman in the photo was their daughter.
At the same time, Yemen investigators established that one of the last users of the phone was registered under the name Khaled Yusef.
His photo found in the digital archive of a local internet cafe matched the man depicted in several images from the device.
However, according to border service data, Khaled Yusef left Yemen in miday 2023 via the port of Alheda.
His whereabouts have been unknown since then.
The operation to exume the body, identify it, and send the remains to Poland took about 2 weeks.
A forensic examination in Warsaw confirmed the identity of the deceased as Karolina Shimanska, 21, a citizen of the Republic of Poland.
The cause of death was extreme exhaustion and dehydration resulting from prolonged deprivation of food and water, lack of medical care, and exposure to extreme temperatures.
The Polish prosecutor’s office opened a criminal case under the article murder of a citizen of the Republic of Poland outside the country with particular cruelty.
The Yemen side handed over all the investigation materials including photographs, protocols, and witness statements.
However, Khaled Yusef remained at large and the case stalled at the stage of international inquiries.
Several international human rights organizations also expressed interest, but they were not granted direct access to the case.
Amid pressure from the media and Polish MPs, the first details of Karolina’s life were made public.
She had graduated from school just a year ago and enrolled at a teacher training university in Bidgos.
It soon emerged that she had a blog where she wrote about her dream of teaching abroad and helping women in the Middle East.
Several of her friends said that at the end of 2021, Karolina met a man online who introduced himself as an entrepreneur from Yemen living in Istanbul.
Karolina Shamanska was born in Bidgos, a city in northern Poland into a middle-class family.
Her father worked as an electrician for a private energy company and her mother was a music teacher at an elementary school.
Her parents described Karolina as calm, disciplined, striving for independence, and showing an early interest in the humanities.
As a teenager, she was actively involved in charity work, supporting migrants and refugees.
Already in her final years of high school, she began to express a desire to work in countries with low levels of protection for women.
After graduating from high school in 2021, Karolina enrolled in the first year of the faculty of education at the Kazmiier’s Vielki University in Bidgos.
She planned to specialize in teaching Polish as a foreign language.
At the same time, she started blogging on Instagram and Medium where she shared her thoughts on women’s rights, Middle Eastern culture, and the prospects for international education.
The blog did not have a broad audience, but it was actively read among left-leaning young people.
Gradually, her posts began to mention Yemen more and more often, a country that, in her own words, she did not understand, but felt.
In the fall of 2021, according to her friends, Karolina registered on an international language exchange chat where she met a man who called himself Khaled.
He introduced himself as an entrepreneur working in Turkey, but with family ties in Yemen.
Carolina did not immediately tell her friends about this contact, but after a few weeks, their correspondence turned into daily communication.
Screenshots of the correspondence provided by relatives contained discussions about marriage, religion, culture, and repatriation to Yemen.
Judging by the style of his messages, the man was well educated, avoided aggressive rhetoric, and spoke about women’s rights and the value of education.
By the end of the year, Khaled suggested that Carolina meet him in Turkey, ostensibly to discuss a joint project to establish a private school for girls in rural Yemen.
In his correspondence, he emphasized that Carolina would have freedom and that her work would become an example of a new approach to education in Islamic countries.
Despite her mother’s skepticism, Carolina booked a ticket to Istanbul and flew there in mid January 2022.
Upon arrival in Turkey, she got in touch with her friends.
She spent several days in Istanbul, met with Khaled, and posted photos on social media.
According to her friends, he looked polite, well-groomed, and calm in the pictures.
However, a week later, Karolina announced that she was leaving with him for Yemen, where she planned to stay for a couple of months.
Her parents were strongly opposed, but she was of legal age, and there were no formal grounds for prohibiting her from traveling.
According to Polish police, she left Turkey via Istanbul airport, flying to Aden, Yemen on February 3rd.
After arriving in Yemen, Karolina contacted her parents once via video call.
The conversation lasted less than 5 minutes.
She said that everything was fine, that they were preparing for the engagement ceremony, and that she felt safe.
However, according to her sister, Karolina looked very tense, and a solid concrete fence, typical of private homes in Yemen neighborhoods, was visible in the background.
She has not made a single call or sent a single message since then.
Her relatives began to worry a few days later.
At first, it was assumed that she might have problems with the internet or her device.
But when Karolina did not get in touch, even on her 21st birthday after 2 weeks of silence, her family reported her missing to the police in Bidosh.
As she had left the country, the case was transferred to the international cooperation department.
However, further action by the Polish authorities was limited by the lack of diplomatic presence in Yemen and the unstable situation in the region.
Meanwhile, Karolina’s social media accounts were frozen.
Her last post, a selfie at Istanbul airport, was dated January 28th.
All attempts by relatives to contact Khaled through his old accounts were unsuccessful.
His profiles had been deleted or renamed.
Attempts to track her route using her passport details were only successful for her flight to Aiden.
After crossing the border, no information about her movements appeared in the database.
In July, the family turned to the Foundation Against Violence Against Women, a human rights organization with experience in working with international structures and investigating cases of forced marriage.
The foundation sent
official requests to Interpol, the International Red Cross, and several non-governmental organizations working in Yemen.
The responses were formal.
It was impossible to establish the girl’s location without the assistance of local authorities.
And in the context of armed conflict and the lack of stable governance in the regions, the chances of an effective investigation were extremely slim.
At the same time, the foundation contacted German journalists with experience working in the Middle East.
One of them, reporter Hines Mueller, was in Djibouti at the time and agreed to conduct an unofficial investigation.
In October 2022, he entered Sana via the western border and contacted local activists.
One of the informants told him that in the Assaba area, there were reports of a European woman who had been locked up after her wedding, but he warned that intervention could be dangerous.
The information was passed on to the foundation, but without the home address or official details, further progress stalled.
Over the following months, Karolina’s family repeatedly appealed to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to expand the search.
They were told that the situation was complicated by the lack of consular presence in Yemen, the unstable situation, and the inability to access local authorities.
In essence, Carolina’s fate remained unknown for almost a year and a half until a rainstorm in August destroyed the fence of an old house, revealing a handwelded metal cage.
The Sana police officially confirmed the discovery of the body of a young woman of European appearance on the third day after the storm.
The statement contained only brief information.
The body was found in a metal structure.
No signs of violent death were recorded and the identity was not established.
An internal police report which later came into the possession of human rights activists contained more details.
Signs of exhaustion, lack of food in the cage, partial deformation of the forearm bones, and the presence of feces indicating that the woman had been held in complete isolation and had not left the cage for a long time.
The house where the cage was found was a traditional private residential building with thick brick walls, no windows to the outside, and a flat roof.
According to cadastral data, the property was registered to a deceased owner, but in reality, it was rented out through informal deals.
The police began working with residents, interviewing 19 people living within a radius of 100 m.
Four of them gave similar statements in the spring.
They heard a woman screaming from the courtyard of the house.
One of the men noted that he heard banging on metal.
However, no one reported this to the authorities.
According to them, they did not want to get involved in a personal drama or feared that intervention would lead to conflict.
The investigation established that the house had been rented to at least six families over the past 2 years.
In the absence of a centralized registration of rental agreements, the main way to establish the identity of the tenants was through witness statements from neighbors and informal contracts.
One neighbor mentioned a man with a distinct foreign appearance who had been living in the house with a woman of European appearance for several months last year.
He also gave specific dates.
March and April 2022.
According to him, the woman later disappeared and the man left the house in the middle of the year.
Investigators focused on reconstructing the travel itinerary of individuals associated with this address.
They managed to access data from a local telecommunications company.
Between March and June, a mobile phone number registered to Khaled Yusf was active in the area.
This information matched the data found on the phone discovered in the house.
Moreover, the same number had previously been registered in Turkey on a tourist SIM card issued to the same person as confirmed by the Turkish authorities in response to an international request.
The phone contained a series of messages, most of which had been deleted.
However, police digital experts managed to recover several chains of correspondence.
One of them mentioned Carolina and contained fragments of text.
She was crying again.
I told her to pray.
If she doesn’t eat, it’s her problem.
A photo of the cell from the outside was also found, apparently taken at the time of her argument.
In the background are the same walls as in the house on the street where the deceased was found.
Access to a cloud archive synchronized with the phone was also restored.
It contained dozens of photos of Karolina, some in everyday clothes, most likely taken in Europe, and others in traditional women’s clothing typical of Yemen.
In one of the photos dated March 2022, she is sitting in the corner of a courtyard next to a white bowl.
The woman’s face is pale, her expression detached.
Analysis of the metadata confirmed that the photo was taken on the premises of this house.
Another image shows a cage without a lid.
The investigation established that the top part had been welded shut later based on welding marks and the degree of metal oxidation.
The police questioned three people who had previously worked on the premises of this house as handymen.
One of them, a man named Sed Raman, said that at the beginning of last year, he was called to install a canopy in the yard.
He noted that he saw a lattice structure, but did not think much of it, assuming it was for animals.
He had no contact with the woman, but said he heard someone coughing inside.
He did not report this to anyone.
A key piece of information came from a local jeweler to whom the suspect, as it later transpired, had been selling gold jewelry.
In April 2022, a man resembling Khaled Yusef came to him and handed over a chain, earrings, and a ring, all women’s jewelry.
The jeweler provided a copy of the receipt with the customer’s signature.
An examination confirmed that the handwriting matched the inscriptions on the inside cover of one of Khaled’s phones.
The investigation also found that from April to the end of June, electricity in the house was used minimally with only occasional use.
The water bill showed a sharp drop in consumption from mid-spring.
This coincides with the estimated period when Karolina could have been deprived of her liberty and then left alone.
At the same time, the Polish side provided the police with a list of Karolina’s bank transactions.
The last transaction from her card was recorded in March.
A cash withdrawal from an ATM in central SA.
After that, access to her accounts was blocked.
An attempt was made to log into online banking from a device registered in Yemen, but the system rejected the attempt.
Investigators assumed that Khaled had tried to access her finances but was unable to pass authorization.
In midepptember, the Yemen police sent an official request to Interpol for the arrest of Khaled Yusef.
The document stated that he was the main suspect in the case of the illegal detention and death of a Polish citizen.
However, according to information received from Interpol partners, he may have left Yemen after May on a cargo ship bound for Eratraa.
From there, his trail was lost.
At that point, the investigation faced a legal obstacle.
An official murder charge was required to obtain an international arrest warrant.
However, the Yemen prosecutor’s office was in no hurry to classify the incident as murder, citing insufficient evidence to establish intent.
The Polish side insisted on the contrary, evidence had been gathered of intentional deprivation of liberty, lack of food, attempts to cover up traces, and destruction of documents.
Meanwhile, investigators established that Carolina had not left the house for at least 4 months.
No vending machines, CCTV cameras, or ATMs recorded her face.
Analysis of her phone’s geoloccation also confirmed that it had not moved from a radius of 30 m.
International pressure intensified.
European human rights organizations, having received reports from their Polish colleagues, made details of the case public.
In Poland, solitary pickets were held outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
A rally was organized in Warsaw demanding that the procedure for issuing an international arrest warrant be expedited.
In early November 2023, the suspect Khaled Yusef was arrested in Sudan at the request of the Polish prosecutor’s office acting through Interpol.
He was detained in a border area at a checkpoint near the city of Casala while attempting to cross the border without documents.
His identity was established through fingerprints that matched data obtained from a phone found in a house in Sana.
Under diplomatic agreements, he was extradited to Poland because the victim was a Polish citizen and the crime was recognized as transnational.
During interrogations in Warsaw, Yousef initially refused to testify, claiming that Karolina left voluntarily and that he had nothing to do with her disappearance.
However, after being presented with evidence, including photographs, correspondence, and cell DNA analysis, he agreed to cooperate.
The case file corroborated his testimony.
According to his version of events, after meeting Karolina and her arrival in Yemen, he did indeed marry her according to Islamic customs.
However, immediately after the marriage, he became disappointed in her.
She refused to wear a nikab, disagreed with his demands, and did not accept the restrictions he considered necessary for her protection.
He began to control her movements, took her passport and phone, and after a few days entirely restricted her freedom.
He claimed that he didn’t plan to kill her, but only wanted to teach her respect and isolate her until she submitted.
However, the actual actions recorded in the case file showed systematic and deliberate isolation, humiliation, torture, and killing.
According to the investigation, Karolina was locked in a metal cage that he had made himself.
Welded seams on the top cover indicated that the cage had been initially open, but he later welded the top shut to prevent her from escaping.
The cage was located in an inner courtyard, hidden from view from the street.
It has been established that during the first weeks, she was given food, leftover flatbread, rice, and water in plastic bottles.
However, her food became increasingly scarce.
Between April and July, her diet practically disappeared.
A bowl and a bottle with mold found in the cage remained untouched, indicating that she had not been fed for a long time before her death.
An examination showed that Karolina was emaciated entirely during the last month of her life.
Her body fat was critically low.
Her muscles were wasted and her bones were partially deformed.
Areas of skin necrosis were found on her elbows and knees, indicating prolonged immobility and an inability to change position.
Microparticles of rust and skin were found under her fingernails, suggesting attempts to scratch the metal.
Traces of blood on the inside of the cage bars confirmed that she had tried to escape.
Some areas of the bars show signs of bending, presumably from her head and hands hitting them.
According to Yousef, one day in June, he noticed that she was no longer moving, and frightened, covered the cage with a tarpolin, and left it in the sun.
He later left the house, taking some belongings, including documents and phones.
He also tried to sell some of her jewelry.
The body remained in the cage for more than 6 weeks before a storm destroyed the house.
The air temperature during this period reached 40° C and decomposition was slow.
The cage was shaded, which explains why the body was still intact when it was discovered.
The manner of death was deemed particularly painful.
Karolina died of complete exhaustion caused by lack of food, water, physical activity, and exposure to high temperatures.
Doctors recorded what is known as confinement syndrome, a condition in which the victim loses coordination.
Speech loses consciousness and dies within a few days after reaching a critical state of exhaustion.
According to forensic analysis, death occurred between July 15th and 20th, 2023.
A court in Warsaw found Khaled Yusef guilty of intentional deprivation of liberty, torture, murder with particular cruelty, and torture resulting in death.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the right to parole.
The court emphasized that Ysef’s actions were systematic, motivated by ideological control and complete disregard for human life.
During the trial, it was established that before meeting Carolina, he had already been on the radar of the Women’s Services in Turkey, where he had previously been accused of domestic violence against another woman, a Moroccan citizen.
Still, the case was closed due to a lack of evidence from the victim.
Karolina Shimanska’s story caused a wave of outrage in Europe.
Polish and international media conducted a series of investigations into the problem of female tourism to countries with high levels of domestic violence, informal marriages, and legal loopholes in the protection of European women abroad.
In Poland, a special coordination department for women’s affairs in Islamic countries was set up within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In Yemen, there were no official comments from the authorities.
The Foundation Against Violence Against Women with the support of the Shimanska family initiated a campaign to create a database of women’s cases abroad.
A memorial plaque has been erected at her burial site in Warsaw with the inscription Karolina.
She left to help.
She was locked up to silence her.
We will not forget.
