The never ending journey of Mohammed NL

Mohammed he was not happy. He lived with one foot in his country and the other permanently pointing to the horizon line. “Whenever I saw him during the holidays he would tell me that he wanted to leave because I couldn’t find a job or was happy. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn’t find any other solution, “says his cousin Khalti Farida from Montreal, the Canadian city where she moved with her parents after leaving Algeria in the aftermath of the civil war that bled the former French colony in the 1990s. One day Mohammed told his mother that he was leaving. He paid 24,000 dinars (152 euros) for a passage by boat from Algiers at Balearic Islands. It was never known again. Your boat wrecked in the Mediterranean western. Apparently there were no survivors.

At home it took time for the alarms to sound. It was not at all uncommon for Mohammed to disappear from time to time without giving a further sign when he lived in Algiers. Maybe he had found a job on the other side, maybe he had fallen in love, maybe he had been arrested. But the date of his departure did not bode well. The past is gone February 4th, in the middle of winter, when the curling waves of the Mediterranean can become sharp blades for the precarious barges that plow through it.

The family began to investigate and in April they came across the missing posters that he International Center for the Identification of Missing Migrants (CIPIMD) post on your Facebook page. They contacted the volunteer organization he runs Maria Angeles Colsa from Malaga and the ball started rolling. That same month, CIPIMD sent them a report with photographs of a body found on the Granada beach of La Rabita April 4. “The features and description were very similar: the tattoos, his mother’s ring, the life jacket he was wearing – for us there was no doubt that it was him, but his parents did not want to accept it. They were in shock, so we opted for do the dna test, “recalls Farida.

“A very long and traumatic process”

Related news

The first DNA test requested from the mother gave apparently an incomplete result, so the judicial police requested a second check sample. This time from the father. “It’s being a very long, traumatic and painful process. We are in december, it’s been ten months, and the body is not yet in Algeria, “says Mohammed’s cousin, who was 26 when he got on the boat.” He was a sociable kid, the kind of person who needs love and attention. He loved to sing, dance and play the drum. “But, as happens to many young Algerians, Mohammed fabled with other latitudes.” It is possible that he wanted to go as far as France, where we have family, “adds Farida with a broken voice.

Neither she nor hers know when the identification process will end. The father’s DNA sample has yet to arrive in Spain to be compared with that of the body found, which is waiting in a Granada morgue. “We want to bury him in his town to close this chapter so that the family can definitely find some peace, “says Farida. Like Mohammed’s, there are hundreds of stories awaiting an outcome, hundreds of families waiting for a clue, a phone call, a wisp of light amid so much silence. “My cousin deserves to rest and return to his Creator. This is all very exhausting, “concludes her cousin.