A model arrived in Dubai for an internship—but returned home in a sealed coffin!

A model arrived in Dubai for an internship—but returned home in a sealed coffin!

PART1

October 2017, United Arab Emirates.  30 km south of Dubai.  On Friday, around 6:00 a.m., a local shepherd, patrolling the deserted area near the dry riverbed of the Wadihar, noticed a woman’s body washed up on the sand.  The body lay on its side, partially covered with cloth.  Burnt fingers cramped .  There are almost no clothes left.

   The face was disfigured by blows.  The police arrived 37 minutes later.  By 9 a.m. the area was surrounded by tape.  A forensic team was at work. People wearing masks and carrying backpacks to collect evidence were crawling around the area.  Drone footage posted on a private Telegram channel a day later clearly showed the body had not been moved by wind or animals.

It lay where it was placed. At first, everything followed the typical scenario for local crime reports: an anonymous victim, heat, trampled sand.  But a day later a name appeared.   The Canadian Embassy confirmed the identity. The girl is Noémie Charpentier, 22 years old, a Canadian citizen from Montreal, a fashion student at the University of Quebec, and a temporary resident of the UAE on a trainee visa.

  arrived as part of an international internship program concluded between the university and the private company Air.  Six days earlier, on October 15, Noemi stopped contacting her parents.  The last recorded message in her messenger.  I have a meeting today.  You need to behave formally.  I can’t miss it.  According to the provider, this message was sent at 158.

After 9 minutes, the phone stopped being active.  The geolocation points to a villa on the outskirts of the Albarsha district, a house with white walls and a high concrete fence. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, street surveillance cameras were not working due to technical problems.  Noemmi entered the house alone and did not come out.

  An official press release issued by the UAE police on October 23 stated that the cause of death was heatstroke.   The air temperature that day reached 41°. According to the medical examiner’s report, there were no signs of open wounds on the body, except for partially burned fingers. Police found no signs of foul play.

  The investigation was closed.  The body was released for repatriation, but in Montreal the heatstroke theory did not satisfy the parents.  They insisted on a re-examination.  The second report was ready after 11 days.  It was conducted by three independent forensic experts from Squibeck and Toronto.  According to the findings, Naemi’s death was caused by mechanical asphyxia and strangulation.

  In addition, signs of restraint were recorded on the body , with characteristic hematomas on the ankles and wrists. Most importantly, the internal organs were missing : the liver, kidneys, and one kidney had been surgically removed, cut off with high precision, without traces of lacerations.

  This is not work, this is operational work. The Glob Mail and Ludevo soon wrote about this. Photos have emerged, a report has been leaked, and an interview with the father has appeared.  Canadian journalists requested materials and cases from the UAE, but were refused.  Requests to the private company OON Air remained unanswered.

  Not a single employee of the fashion house that accepted Noémie as an intern has contacted her. Phones are unavailable.  The website has been removed.   The Dubai office has been sealed.  According to information received from French journalist Frederic Busot, MeZN was registered through an offshore company in the Virgin Islands.

  The sole nominal owner is a 30-year-old Czech citizen who lives in Prague and, as it later turns out, has no connection to the fashion industry.  The University of Montreal confirmed that the internship program did exist, but the legal basis for the agreement was extremely vague. It was signed in 2015 at the faculty level without approval from the university legal department.

Correspondence with the receiving party was conducted through unofficial email addresses. None of the department’s staff, including the internship coordinator, met personally with representatives of Meon Air.  Soon new details began to emerge.  Over the past four years, according to the independent journalistic association Borderless Investigations, at least 15 other female students from France, Italy, Canada, and South Korea have completed internships under a similar program.

  Open sources indicate that everyone returned, but contact with them could not be established.  Their social media profiles are deleted, their phones are inactive, even their Google Cash archives are empty.  Some of the names turned out to be pseudonyms.  Several girls, according to information from the International Centre for Missing Persons database, are also listed as missing.

But with different dates in other countries, the investigation begins to move into a different plane.  Naemi’s parents are asking Canadian federal authorities to initiate an intergovernmental investigation.   A special department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is being called in .

  A working group is being formed .  Journalists find a new clue.  One of the internship agreements with On was signed on behalf of the office located in Geneva, Switzerland.  In November, a month after the discovery of the body, Frédéric Busot received a document, an extract from a Swiss registry, according to which Mezon R included another division of RLAPS AG, registered as a research center in the field of biotechnology.

  Address: industrial zone outside Lasanne, same legal owner, same offshore chains.  Journalists are beginning to unite in Paris, Montreal, Geneva.   A new version appears.  The internships could have been a cover for transporting women to the OA for the purpose of unauthorized medical intervention. Organ trafficking, experiments, elite clinics.

PART2

But this is just an assumption for now.  At this stage, the official wording of the Emirati police is still in effect.  Heat stroke, natural circumstances closed.  Nomi’s body was buried in Montreal under the supervision of municipal authorities.  But the relatives continue to demand a new investigation.

  They don’t need an explanation, they need the truth, and it seems to be more than just one dead body.   The investigation began with an attempt to trace Noémie Charpenté’s route in the first days after her arrival in Dubai. According to data provided by the UAE immigration service, the girl arrived in the country on October 9, 2017, on an Emirates flight from Toronto with a transfer in Amsterdam.

  At passport control at Dubai airport, she indicated the Millennium Al Barsha Hotel as her temporary residence , which was confirmed by entries in the check-in log.  Hotel cameras recorded her appearance daily until October 15.  That day at 2:50 p.m. she left the building, got into a white car with tinted windows and drove away.

  The car number is illegible.  This video footage was the last confirmed visual contact with Noemi.  The next day, Montreal program coordinator Marie Claire Dubois received a message from an unknown user, sent from a temporary Telegram account.  It said: “Your student has cancelled . The reasons are personal.

 Please remove them from the program. Confirm.” Dubois ignored the message.  She decided that it was a mistake and did not pay any attention to it.  She only found out about the girl’s disappearance after her parents contacted the university four days later.  It was then discovered that Noemi’s email was unavailable and her WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger were frozen.

  The Instagram and Twitter accounts were deleted within an hour on the evening of October 15.  The IP address from which the deletion occurred belonged to a corporate network in the Dubai Marina area, registered to a company involved in logistics and pharmaceutical supplies. Meanwhile, a local investigation has begun in Quebec .

  Journalists from Lapres established contact with two former interns of the program who completed an internship at the same organization in 2016. One of them, whose name has not been disclosed, agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.  According to her, the conditions of stay were strange.  The participants were housed separately.

  They were not allowed to be contacted outside the office. The traffic was controlled.  Personal phones were confiscated during the internship, citing privacy policy. The contract contained a medical clearance clause in which the signatory consented to procedures to assess stress tolerance and emotional response.

  Upon arrival in Dubai, the participants were examined by a man who introduced himself as a doctor from the clinic at the consulting center.  After this, several of them were transferred to a separate direction, where they participated in private shows. The woman did not provide any further details, stating that she signed a non-disclosure agreement under threat of a fine and a lifetime ban from professional activity in the industry.

  By this point, an investigation by journalists from Vice and the French Mediapar showed that such internships were used not only in Dubai.  In the 2000s, a similar structure with the same communication style, similar contracts and the same email addresses already appeared in Italy, and in 2011 in Turkey.

  In both cases, information about missing participants surfaced.  In Istanbul, one of the students, a Spanish citizen, disappeared without a trace six days after her arrival. The case was closed, citing a possible escape.  It was later revealed that she appeared under a different name on the list of interns in Dubai two years later.

  After this the trail is lost.  Expanding the geographic scope of the investigation, Borderless Investigations began comparing company registrations.  Through publicly accessible offshore companies, it was possible to establish a chain of custody.  Mezon Air was part of a larger scheme involving at least nine entities in Panama.

Switzerland, Hong Kong and Estonia.  They are all connected through one administrator, Lebanese citizen Mahmoud Aruni.  He was listed as a director in six structures, including the company that owned the car that took Noemi away. Aruni was registered as an international logistician with a license to transport medical equipment.

  At the same time, journalists gained access to an internal letter from one of the Swiss banks, sent in September of the same year.  The letter reported unusual financial activity on an account belonging to RLAPS AG.  Transfers totaling over 2 million euros were sent to the Emirates, Lebanon and South Africa. Purpose of payments, research needs, private medical expenses and corporate consulting.

The beneficiaries included three names that had not previously been mentioned in the press.  Two of them had diplomatic immunity.  In December 2017, a man was detained in Amsterdam after attempting to fly to Qatar using a fake passport.  Upon verification, it was discovered that he was using a  Bulgarian citizen’s ID card, but his fingerprints matched the Interpol database.

  He turned out to be Piero Mazzini, an Italian who had previously worked for an international pharmaceutical company and was fired in 2004 after being accused of smuggling medical drugs. Macini admitted that since 2005 he had collaborated with a number of private clinics specializing in palliative surgery and transplantation, and that his work had always been related to the logistics of bodies.

  He denied any connection with Noah Charpentier, but photographs of documents with the girl’s name were found on his phone. One of them is a page from an internship application with a signature and date.  Its authenticity was confirmed by the family. His laptop’s hard drive contains an archive of correspondence with ORAPS representatives, including a reference to series 27.

 This term would later surface in another investigation, this time in Africa, where unofficial clinical trials of a drug that suppresses the immune response in organ transplant patients were underway. While these details were being compiled into a dossier, officially everything remained unchanged in Dubai.

  The case is closed, there is no evidence.  Foreign journalists are subject to access restrictions.  In January 2018, the Canadian Embassy issued a renewed statement calling for transparency and cooperation with international scrutiny.   There  was no response from the Emirati side, but at this time a key witness appeared.

  The name of the woman who decided to speak out was not initially revealed.  In the documents, she appeared as Sarah A. Later, after consultation with lawyers and with the support of the human rights organization Medical Whistle Blowers International, she gave a public interview under her full name: Sarah Irene Arnold, 26, a British citizen and a former student at the London School of Art and Design.

  She said that in the spring of 2016, she took part in an internship through Air, having received an invitation after selection through an internal competition at the faculty.  The program included a three-week stay in Dubai, accommodation, transportation, and participation in the preparation of a private fashion show.

The reality, according to Sarah, turned out to be completely different.  Upon arrival in Dubai, she was not accommodated in a hotel, as stated in the documents, but in a private house on the outskirts of the Albarsha district.  There were already three other girls there, from France, South Korea and Argentina.

Everyone’s phones were confiscated during confidential preparation.  The windows were covered with thick curtains.  Movement was controlled by a security guard.  Every morning a car arrived and took the girls to the center.  Sarah recalls the place as reminiscent of a laboratory: white walls, steel doors, no markings.

  Employees in uniform without identifying marks.  On the second day of her stay, they took blood, ran tests, and did an ultrasound.  They didn’t explain to her why.  Later, the girl was invited for a consultation, where they told her that she had excellent parameters.  and offered to undergo a voluntary medical procedure for a large reward.  She refused.

On the third day, she said, the Argentine disappeared.  Her things remained, but the bed was neatly made, as if it had never been there .  Nobody answered the questions. Two days later, the Frenchwoman fell ill.  She developed a fever and convulsions.  They took her away and she never saw her again.

  On the seventh day of her stay, Sarah attempted to escape.  At night, she escaped from the building through a utility window and ran to a residential area, where she was picked up by a local woman.  The next day, the girl found herself at the British Consulate. She has been in hiding ever since.  The OA strongly advised her not to contact the police.

  Her testimony became key.  Following the publication of her interview by the BBC, UK law enforcement authorities initiated a request to Interpol. Based on her testimony, an international investigation into the activities of the UN and all structures associated with it began. Canadian investigators confirmed the veracity of the details she described, including the locations of houses, car license plates, and the interior layout of the center where the tests were conducted.

Sarah’s testimony also coincided with the findings of Swiss journalists, who had by that time discovered a presentation by RLAPS AG in the archives of the Geneva Chamber of Commerce .  Under the guise of ethical biomedical research, it described work with donors aged 20 to 30 years.

  Consent to participate in research involving invasive procedures.  After 2 months, data was received on the transportation of medical samples from the UAE to Geneva. Documents leaked by a customs informant contained notes about Category B organic samples sent to a clinic whose license was suspended in 2012 after publishing data on unauthorized transplants on Saudi Arabian patients.

  Three years later the license was reinstated.  In March 2018, Felix Van Oosterhoud, a Belgian doctor who was listed as a consultant for RLAPS AG, was arrested in Geneva.  Thirty-four files on young women were found on his laptop , including a photo of Noémie Charpentier.  The documents contained scanned copies of the questionnaires.

  medical indicators, instructions for preparation for procedures and signatures in Arabic.  According to experts, the signatures may have been forged.  Van Oosterhout himself claimed that he was unaware of the violent nature of the procedures and that he was working under contracts with private clinics without asking questions.

  The testimony of Osterhout, Sarah Arnold, and documents from the laptop formed the basis for the first criminal case opened in Switzerland under the article “Trafficking in human beings for medical use.”  This was the first case in Europe in which investigative authorities acknowledged the existence of an organized scheme disguised as educational programs and cultural exchanges.

  The case involved seven countries, 15 legal entities and, according to preliminary data, at least 27 victims.  The investigation concluded that the network had been operating since at least 2010.  At the center stood a man whose name was mentioned in the reports under the pseudonym Raphael S. It would later emerge that this was Raphael Sadek, a French citizen and former employee of a private pharmaceutical company who had been fired for falsifying clinical data.

  In the UAE, he served on the board of directors of Air Global, a company registered in the Dubai Free Zone.  However, by the time the investigation began, Rafael Sadek had disappeared.  His last movement was recorded at Abu Dhabi Airport.  Flight to Johannesburg.  As of early 2021, he was listed as wanted but had not been officially detained.

  In May 2019, the Arlaps trial began in the Swiss Federal Court  .  Of the sixteen defendants, seven were taken into custody.  The rest were charged in absentia.  Among them are two doctors: a logistician, a translator, and a UAE citizen, a former employee of a government clinic.  The trial lasted more than six months.

   The case file included a figure: at least 41 victims, including Noémie Charpentier.  Only eight of them have been officially identified.  The rest were listed as unidentified donors.  The prosecutor’s office sought to have the organization recognized as a criminal group.  operating under the cover of educational structures.

  The verdicts were handed down in December 2019. Van Oosterhoud received eight years, the company secretary five.  The rest received sentences from 3 to 6 years in prison.  The court found the activity to be criminal, but did not identify the full list of participants.  Rafael Sadek remained wanted.

  Noemi’s case was not formally reclassified.  The UAE refused to hand over the case materials or recognize the results of the independent examination.  It seemed that everything was finished, but two months later the editorial office of the Ministry of Education and Science received a flash drive with an encrypted archive.

  It was sent from South Africa.  There were hidden camera videos inside. One of them shows a woman who looks like Noemi sitting in a room, bound in belts.  In the background are medical workers in uniforms without insignia.  The video is dated October 16.  It was the day after she disappeared.

  The flash drive sent to the Leontes editorial office became a key element that cast doubt on the official version of Noémie Charpentier’s death.  After decryption, digital forensics experts confirmed the authenticity of the metadata. The recordings were not edited and were taken with a miniature camera with automatic date and time input.

  The first video recording lasted 15 minutes.  The camera was presumably mounted under a table or medical couch.  The frame shows a room with grey walls, a metal cabinet, and a stretcher.  A girl in a hospital gown is strapped to a chair.  The face was beaten, but the parents identified him.  It was Noemi.  She was conscious and tried to say something.

  Four minutes later, two people in white coats and masks appeared in the frame.  One of them is a man with a characteristic limp in his right leg.  He looks through the documents and gives instructions in English.  Under anesthesia, episode 27. The recording ends there.  There were eight videos in total on the flash drive.

  Five of them are documentary films of medical procedures carried out without observing sterility and with gross violations of ethics.  Commands in English, French and Arabic can be heard in the background .  In some videos, the patients do not move.  Either under anesthesia or dead.  One of the files records the moment of removal of a kidney organ and its subsequent packaging in a container.

  On the plastic box there is a sticker with the logo of a private clinic in Cape Town.  This institution was not officially licensed to perform transplant operations.  According to information obtained from a former Interpol employee, later a political refugee in Germany, similar archives have previously been recorded as part of closed investigations into the illegal trafficking of organs in Central Asia.

Some of the personnel featured in the videos were also seen in operational developments in Turkey, Kenya and Kosovo.  However, none of the cases reached trial due to lack of direct evidence or intervention by local authorities.   The flash drive itself was sent via a private courier company in an envelope without a return address.

  The only trace was a South African postmark and a fingerprint that matched a woman named Nomvule Dlamini, who previously worked as a nurse at the private Gordon Medical clinic in Pretoria.  Her address was listed in a police report filed after she disappeared in October 2019.  Since then, her whereabouts have been unknown. Lemonde handed over the archive to the Swiss prosecutor’s office.

  The recordings were also shown to Noemi’s parents.  They filed a new lawsuit against the UAE, demanding official recognition of the murder. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs issued a strongly worded statement calling Dubai’s refusal to cooperate with the investigation unacceptable and contrary to international law.

  However, there was no response from the Emirati side.  The statement from the UAE Ministry of Interior merely reiterated that the case was closed due to the lack of evidence of a crime and that the intervention of foreign entities was not in accordance with UAE law. Meanwhile, in London, Channel 4 journalists obtained a copy of an internal report from a non-governmental organization operating in East Africa, which described cases of medical expeditions by European specialists to the territory of Eswatini and Lesotho.

  The documents contained names that matched those involved in the Arlas case.  One of them is Raphael Sadek.  According to local sources, he was in southern Africa under a false name, using a fake Portuguese passport.  By the end of 2020, the investigation had acquired the hallmarks of an international scandal, but from a legal perspective, many elements proved unprovable.

The flash drive could not be accepted as evidence in a number of countries.  due to the impossibility of establishing its origin and the legality of filming. The individuals in the video have not been officially identified. Medical institutions in South Africa and the UAE declined to comment.  Key figures remained in hiding.

  In early 2021, journalists obtained an internal European Commission document, a draft report on the risks associated with private international internships in the fields of medicine, fashion, and design.  The document described risks similar to Noemi’s case and proposed the creation of a pan-European database for monitoring educational programmes outside the EU.

  But the document was never officially published.  It was deemed sensitive due to potential diplomatic implications.  To date, no country has acknowledged the existence of systemic human trafficking involving  Air.  However, a number of bodies, including Interpol, WHO and the Council of Europe, have confirmed the need to establish mechanisms to monitor international student mobility programmes.

The story of Noémie Charpentier remains an example of how the imperfections of international mechanisms allow shadow structures to operate for many years.  Trust in educational programs, the lack of interstate verification of companies, and the reluctance of individual countries to cooperate with international investigations create ideal conditions for exploitation and concealment of crimes.

  Naemmi’s family is still trying to get the case reopened. As of June 2025, their petitions had received over 300,000 signatures , but no official UAE authority had re-evaluated the case.  The death certificate still states the cause as heatstroke.  And while new materials continue to circulate through closed channels , the only thing left to do is remember that behind every attractive internship offer there may not be a program, but a scheme.

  And behind the gloss there is a windowless room where no one can hear you scream.