A Gay Girl in Damascus :The Amina Profile

Then one day Amina writes to tell Sandra that the Secret Police had arrested her but thanks to her father’s timely intervention, she was released again. Soon after that Sandra receives an email from Amina’s cousin Raina saying that Amina had been abducted and the family have absolutely no idea where she was being held.  This is followed by a deafening cyberspace silence for some months and Sandra tries everything she can think off to track her girlfriend down to see if she is still alive and see if she can save her. She even lists the help of the US State Department.  However despite all her extensive efforts she starts to draw so many blanks and finds it impossible to get a single lead on her girlfriend who by now is a world famous blogger, and then the penny finally starts to drop, albeit very slowly.

There is no Amina.  This bizarre real life true story takes a 180 degree turn when Sandra eventually engages the services of some clever IT geeks who track down the IP address of the computer that Amina’s emails were sent from. It’s not in Damascus, or any other part of Syria but in Edinburgh at an address owned by an American academic Thomas MacMaster and his German born wife. He is the real author of all the emails and the one that had conjured up the fake profile that Sandra had come across on line.  The pictures that he had sent claiming to be the outspoken Amina were in fact stolen images of a Croatian girl living in London. When he was finally exposed, the discovery did not just distress Sandra but infuriated the media who claimed that all the coverage they had devoted to the case had diverted public attention to the horrors of the Syrian regime which should have remained as the main story coming out of that region.