Spanish Singer invited to perform in Dubai – what SHEIKH DID SHOCKED EVERYONE…
Martha Rivero died on November 25th, 2023 in an underground bunker of a luxurious residence in the desert outside Dubai with a broken neck and her vocal cords cut out. Her killer, Shik Rashid Iben Khaled Al- Nahayan, collected human voices, and Marta became the 24th exhibit in his private gallery of horrors.
The story began a month earlier when the singer from Seville received a letter that seemed like a gift from fate. On October 23rd, 2023, Marta received an email from a certain fisel al-Maktum who introduced himself as Shik Rasheed’s personal assistant and said that his employer wanted to invite the Spanish singer to a private concert at his residence for a fee of €200,000 for a performance lasting no more than 2 hours.
Marta was 31 years old and had been singing flamco in the bars of Seville since she was 16, but she only became widely known two years ago after an article in a Madrid newspaper in which a music critic wrote that her voice sounded as if it were made of molten gold and broken glass at the same time. After the publication, Marta got an agent.
A small contract with a label and invitations to festivals in Barcelona and Paris. But $200,000 for one evening was more than she had earned in the entire previous year. Her agent Carlos checked the authenticity of the offer and found out that Shik Rashid really existed. a representative of a side branch of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi, owner of a chain of hotels, known for his eccentric hobbies, about whom the press wrote almost nothing, but several articles in specialized publications mentioned his collection of vintage recording equipment, which
included an original Edison photograph and the only working example of a German magneetapon K4 tape recorder from 1938. Carlos saw nothing suspicious, explaining to Marta that rich people often invited artists to private events for huge sums of money because privacy was expensive. And on October 28th, Marta signed the contract and a business class ticket to Dubai was purchased for November 15th.
She arrived in the evening of the same day and was met at the airport by Fisizel himself, a tall man in his 50s, wearing an immaculate white dish dasha with a perfect British accent, who escorted the singer to a black Mercedes Maybach with tinted windows and drove her along a road that took them far beyond Dubai in an hour, first along the coast and then into the desert.
Martha began to feel nervous about how far they were traveling from the city. But Fisel explained that the shake’s residence was in a secluded location because his employer valued silence and believed that the noise of the city interfered with the proper perception of music. And this explanation seemed reasonable to Martha, although a slight uneasiness remained.
Entering through a tall gate with security guards, they proceeded along a marble-paved road through gardens with palm trees and fountains that seemed impossible in the middle of the desert until they reached the residence itself. A three-story building of sandstone and glass that combined modern architecture with traditional Islamic ornamentation.
Fisizel led Martha inside where the air smelled of sandalwood and rose water and the floors were covered with handmade mosaics. Then took her up to the second floor to the guest apartments which were larger than her apartment in Seville, a huge four-poster bed, a marble bathroom with a jacuzzi, and a terrace overlooking the illuminated garden.
The shake’s assistant informed her that the performance would take place the following day at 8:00 p.m. and that until then the singer was welcome to use the spa and swimming pool. He then bowed and left, leaving Martha alone with a growing sense of isolation. She unpacked her suitcase, took a shower, and went out onto the terrace where a huge moon hung over the desert, and the silence was so complete that Martha could hear her own breathing and nothing else.
No sounds of the city, cars, people, only the wind in the palm leaves. And this absolute silence made her feel uneasy, as if the whole world had disappeared, leaving her in a beautiful but isolated cage. On November 16th, Martha woke up at 10:00 in the morning and found breakfast waiting for her on the terrace.
Fresh fruit, pastries, coffee, all impeccably served, although she hadn’t heard anyone bring the food. After breakfast, she went down to the pool, swam, sunbathed, but never saw a single person. The entire complex seemed empty, as if it had been built especially for her, and this feeling caused increasing anxiety, which Martha tried to suppress by reminding herself of the €200,000 fee.
At 3:00 in the afternoon, Fisizel arrived and took her to the concert hall, which was located in the west wing of the residence and was impressive for its acoustics. The walls were covered with special panels. The floor was laid with polished wood, and the high dome with stained glass windows let in soft light, creating an almost sacred atmosphere.
In the center of the hall stood a single chair, massive leather throne-like, and Fisizel explained that his employer would sit there alone with no other listeners, just the singer and the shake. Martha felt a chill at this explanation because she was used to singing in front of hundreds of people, and a single listener seemed strange, almost intimate.
But she did a sound check and realized that the acoustics allowed her to sing without a microphone. Her voice filled the hall, bounced off the walls, and returned amplified and purified. It was like singing in a cathedral, only better, and Martha decided that this performance would be special. At exactly 8:00 in the evening, Shik Rasheed entered the hall.
And Marta immediately felt a strange energy emanating from him. He was about 60 years old with a neatly trimmed gray beard and black eyes that showed not just attention but the intense concentration of a predator studying its prey before the pounce. He was dressed in traditional white clothing and moved slowly with dignity.
He nodded to Martha, sat down in a chair, closed his eyes, and said one word in English. Begin. There was such authority in his voice that Martha had no desire to delay. She sang the program she had been preparing for a whole month. Classic flamnco, modern arrangements, two original songs in Spanish, singing about love and loss, passion and pain, her voice soaring to the dome, trembling, breaking, regaining strength.
Martha put her whole soul into this performance because she felt that this man understood music differently than ordinary listeners. He didn’t just listen. He absorbed every note, every vibration, and it mesmerized her so much that she sang better than ever before in her life, forgetting about the strangeness of the situation, about her anxiety, about being in an isolated residence in the middle of the desert with an unfamiliar millionaire.
When she finished the last song, there was such a deep silence in the hall that Martha could hear her own heartbeat, and only after a few seconds did the shake open his eyes, a strange smile on his face, enthusiastic and sad at the same time, as if he had received something precious, but already knew that he would not be able to keep it in its original form.
He slowly rose from his chair, came closer, and Martha felt her whole body tense with an intuitive sense of danger. But she smiled, expecting compliments and gratitude for her performance. The shake said quietly that her voice was perfect, that such voices were born once in a generation, perhaps once in a century, and that he had heard many great singers in his lifetime, but no one sounded like her.
PART2
Then he added, looking her straight in the eye with an expression of absolute conviction that he wanted that voice to stay with him forever, and there was nothing metaphorical in his tone. He meant it literally, like a man accustomed to getting everything he wanted. Martha smiled uncertainly, not understanding what he was getting at, and replied something about recording the concert so she could always listen to it again.
But the shake shook his head with the expression of a patient teacher looking at an uncomprehending student. He explained slowly, enunciating each word that recordings are dead. They only capture sound, but not the live vibration, not the energy of the moment, not the very essence of the voice, and that he does not collect sounds or recordings.
He collects the voices themselves, the physical organs that create these wonderful sounds. Martha did not immediately understand the meaning of what was said. She just stood there, the smile slowly slipping from her face while her brain feverishly tried to reinterpret the shake’s words into some safe, reasonable context.
But then he clapped his hands and two people in medical masks and gloves entered the room, one of them holding a syringe, and reality hit Martha with such force that she couldn’t breathe for a moment. She backed up against the wall and asked in a trembling voice what was happening. And the shake replied softly, almost affectionately, that she shouldn’t worry, that it wouldn’t hurt, that when she woke up, the operation would be over and everything would be behind her.
Martha screamed and rushed for the exit, but the door was locked, and as she jerked the handle, two men had already grabbed her arms. She struggled, scratched, and screamed at the top of her lungs, using her precious voice for the last time. But they were much stronger, holding her professionally, not letting her escape.
One of them stabbed her in the neck with something, and Martha felt a sharp burning sensation, then dizziness. Her legs buckled, and the last thing she saw before falling into darkness was the shake’s face, looking at her with the deep satisfaction of a collector who had found a rare exhibit. Martha woke up in pain, her throat burning as if it were being burned from the inside with a red-hot iron.
Each breath feeling like sharp needles. And when she instinctively tried to scream, only a horse gurgling sound came out of her throat, like the death rattle of a drowning man. She sat up with a jerk on the narrow metal bed. And the first thing she realized was that she was not in the luxurious apartments on the second floor, but in a small concrete room with no windows, lit by cold fluorescent light, with bare walls, a steel sink in the corner, and a toilet.
There was nothing else there, not even a chair. Martha grabbed her throat with both hands and felt a gauze bandage soaked with something wet under her fingers. She tore off the bandage with trembling hands and felt a cut under her fingers. A neat surgical suture running horizontally across the front of her neck, held together with stitches, and in the center of the cut was a small plastic tube about the diameter of a pencil.
She tried to breathe through her nose and mouth, but the air did not flow in the usual way. Instead, she felt it whistling through the tube in her neck, and the realization that she was not breathing as she had all her life caused such a strong panic attack that Martha stopped breathing altogether for a few seconds, frozen with her mouth open, trying to understand what had been done to her.
She tried to scream again, tensing all the muscles in her throat, trying to squeeze out some kind of sound. But instead of a scream, there was only a quiet hiss of air coming out through the tube. No voice, no vocal cords trembling and creating sound. Nothing. Martha crawled on all fours to the sink, pulled herself up, looked into the tiny metal mirror above it, and saw her face deathly pale, her eyes wide with horror, blood caked in the corners of her mouth, and her neck with this monstrous tube sticking out of a fresh incision.
She ran her fingers around the tube, felt it go deep inside, right into her trachea, and realized it was a tracheosttomy, a permanent opening for breathing that is made in people after serious throat or larynx surgery. Her voice disappeared, and this realization hit Martha with such force that she collapsed onto the cold concrete floor and began to sob silently, her body shaking with spasms, tears streaming down her cheeks, her mouth open in a silent scream.
But no sound came out, only the whistling of air through the tube in her neck, which became intermittent from her sobs. She had been singing since she was 16. Her voice was everything. Her work, her passion, her reason for living, a way to express emotions that could not be expressed in words. And now that was gone.
She had been turned into a living corpse, capable of breathing and moving, but deprived of the most important thing. The door opened with a metallic clang, and Fisizel entered, but he no longer looked like a polite assistant with perfect manners. His face was cold and professional, like that of a prison guard, accustomed to dealing with people deprived of their rights and voices.
He looked at Martha, lying on the floor in a pool of tears, without any sympathy, rather with slight irritation that she had woken up earlier than expected, and was making unnecessary noise with her silent sobs. He handed her a glass of water and two white pills, saying that the doctor had warned of possible discomfort after the operation.
and that these pills would help. Martha hit the glass from below. It flew out of Fisel’s hands and shattered on the floor. Shards and water scattered across the concrete, and she tried to yell at him, demand an explanation, but only indistinct guttural sounds came out of her throat. Something between a weeze and a moan, and Fisizel didn’t even flinch, just looked at her with the expression of someone watching a predictable tantrum.
He explained in a calm business-like tone that her vocal cords had been removed during a procedure performed by a qualified surgeon with extensive experience in such operations, that part of her larynx had also been removed, and that a permanent tracheosttomy tube had been inserted, allowing her to breathe without using her normal airways.
Fisizel added that Martha could swallow food and water, breathe, move, and live a relatively normal life, but she would never be able to speak or sing again because the physical organs responsible for producing sound had been irreversibly removed from her body. Martha slowly got up from the floor, holding on to the sink, her legs trembling, her head pounding.
But through the shock and horror, rage began to break through. Pure primal rage at this man, at the shake, at everyone who had participated in this monstrous crime. She took a step toward Fisel, her hands clenched into fists. She wanted to throw herself at him, hit him, scratch him, do anything to inflict pain in response to the pain she had suffered.
But Fisizel raised his hand in a warning gesture and said coldly that if she tried to be aggressive, they would simply tie her up and feed her through a tube. Then he continued as if reading a boring report that his employer had preserved her voice with the utmost care. The concert had been recorded on the highest quality analog tape using equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The recording was perfect without the slightest distortion, and the shake had already listened to it three times. In addition, Fisel explained, Martha’s vocal cords themselves had been removed during surgery and placed in a special formaldahhidebased preservative solution. They are stored in a glass vial in the shake’s personal collection along with other specimens each labeled with the owner’s name, date of birth, date of acquisition, and a brief description of the uniqueness of the voice.
Other specimens, these words sounded so mundane as if Fisizel were talking about stamps or coins, and Martha looked up at him with a mixture of horror and disbelief. Was she not the first? Had this happened before to other people? Fisizel nodded as if he had read her thoughts and said that yes, she was not the first and would not be the last.
His employer had been collecting unique voices for 12 years since 1911 when he first heard the soprano of an Italian opera singer and realized that he wanted to own not just a recording but the very source of this perfection. There are now 23 exhibits in the collection, Fisizel explained.
Each carefully selected singers, a boy soprano from the Vienna Boys Choir, a jazz vocalist from New Orleans, a Tibetan monk with a unique throat singing technique, and Martha became the 24th. He recounted this calmly without emotion, as if describing the process of collecting rare butterflies. And Martha listened, unable to look away.
her brain refusing to believe the reality of what was happening. But the pain in her throat and the whistling of air through the tube were all too real. Fisizel explained that all the previous victims were kept here in the underground part of the residence, each in their own room, where they were fed, cared for, and monitored for their health.
But they would never see the outside world again. never be able to tell anyone what had happened to them because they had no voice and written messages were easy to control. He added that several people had tried to escape in the first months after the operation, but all had been caught by security guards on the grounds of the residence, after which they had been placed in solitary confinement without the right to communicate with other prisoners, and in the end they had resigned themselves to their fate.
Fisizel turned toward the door, but before leaving, he turned back and added in an almost friendly tone that Marta would be brought food three times a day, soft food that was easy to swallow with a tracheosttomy, and that a nurse would come once a day to check her stitches and flush the tube to prevent infection.
He said she shouldn’t try to escape because the complex was guarded by armed men around the clock. The fence was 4 m high. There were cameras and motion sensors around the perimeter, and the nearest settlement was 70 km away in the desert, where the temperature reached 45° during the day. In her current condition, Fisizel explained, with an open wound on her neck and a tracheosttomy that needed to be kept clean at all times, she would not last a single day in the desert and would die of dehydration, infection, or
simply suffocation if the tube became clogged with sand. The door closed behind him, and Martha heard the electronic lock click. A heavy and final sound that meant she was now a prisoner. She sank down onto the bed, her hands rising mechanically to her throat, her fingers carefully tracing the tube, examining the seam, and one thought spinning in her head.
This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t have really happened. In a few hours, she would wake up in her apartment on the second floor. It was just a nightmare caused by pre-performance stress. But the pain was too real. And when she tried again to make any sound, even a quiet moan, only a hiss of air came out of her throat, and reality finally hit her.
Her voice was gone, and with it her whole former life. The following days turned into a blur of pain, despair, and the gradual realization that there would be no salvation. Martha was kept in the same concrete room. And twice a day they brought her food, liquid soups, mashed potatoes, yogurt, anything she could swallow without effort, without straining her damaged throat.
And she ate mechanically, without appetite, simply because her instinct for survival was stronger than her desire to die. Once a day, a nurse in a mask came in. A silent middle-aged woman who checked the stitches, washed the tracheosttomy with saline solution, changed the bandage, and left without saying a word, without meeting Martha’s gaze, as if she were not a person, but an inanimate object requiring technical maintenance.
Martha tried to communicate with gestures, scratched words on the wall with her fingernails, laid out letters with breadcrumbs, begging for help. But the nurse ignored all these attempts, cleaned up the crumbs, washed away the scratches with a damp cloth, and continued her work with the indifference of a robot.
Once Martha grabbed the nurse’s hand when she bent down to check the stitches, trying to get her attention, to make her look her in the eye, to acknowledge her human existence. But the woman just jerked her hand away, stepped back toward the door, and said in broken English that if Martha touched the staff again, she would be fed through a tube while restrained, and the nurse never came again.
Instead, a man began to come who worked even more silently and distantly. On November 23rd, 8 days after the operation, when the wound had begun to heal and the pain had become less acute, turning into a constant dull throbbing, the door opened and Fisizel entered with an unusual proposal. He said that his employer wanted to show Martha the collection so that she could understand the scale of the project she had become a part of, see her place among other selected voices, and realize that her sacrifice made sense in the context of
this great collection of unique sounds. Martha did not move from her bed, seeing no point in going anywhere, but Fisizel added coldly that if she refused, she would spend the rest of her life in this room without the right to even go out into the corridor. Whereas cooperation could bring certain privileges, such as access to the common area where other prisoners were held, the opportunity to see sunlight, at least through the windows of the upper floors during accompanied walks.
Martha stood up because the alternative, spending years in a windowless concrete box, seemed worse than seeing the collection of horrors Fisizel had mentioned. They walked down a long corridor of bare concrete lit by sparse fluorescent lights lined on both sides with metal doors with electronic locks behind each of which Martha realized was a person deprived of their voice.
They descended another level and Fisizel explained that the residence had three underground floors. The top floor for technical rooms and staff, the middle floor for the collection and the bottom floor for the medical ward where operations and rehabilitation therapy were performed. They stopped in front of a massive dark wood door that did not fit in with the utilitarian concrete aesthetic of the rest of the basement, and Fisizel placed his hand on the scanner.
The door opened silently, letting them into a room that took Martha’s breath away. It was a gallery with walls finished in wood paneling and soundabsorbing materials, lighting soft and warm, like in an expensive museum. And along the walls were glass display cases with backlighting, each containing a transparent flask with a yellowish liquid in which two small strips of pinkish fabric floated. Vocal cords.
Martha approached the nearest display case and read the inscription engraved on a copper plate. Julia Morrison, soprano, born March 3rd, 1985. Acquired June 15th, 2011. Uniqueness of voice lies in four octave range and ability to reach third octave without apparent effort. Martha moved on to the next display case.
Thomas Winer, boy soprano, born December 20th, 2001, acquired April 8th, 2013. Uniqueness lies in the crystal clarity of his voice and angelic tamber characteristic of vianese chisters. She walked along the entire wall, reading the names, dates, and descriptions, and with each plaque, a feeling of nauseating horror grew inside her. There were singers from Italy, France, Russia, Brazil, Japan, people of different ages and nationalities, united by only one thing. They had extraordinary voices.
And now those voices floated in formaldahhide like the trophies of a mad collector. At the end of the gallery stood an empty display case with a label already in place. Marta Rivero, Medzo Soprano, born July 12th, 1992. Acquired November 16th, 2023. The uniqueness of the voice lies in a rare combination of strength and fragility, the ability to convey deep emotions through microonal changes in timber.
The voice is described as molten gold and broken glass. Martha stood in front of this display case, reading the description of her own voice in the past tense, as if she were already dead. And indeed, the voice was dead, and what remained was just a shell, devoid of the most important thing. The gallery door opened, and Shik Rasheed entered, dressed in traditional black clothing, his face expressing the deep satisfaction of a man contemplating his greatest achievement.
He slowly walked around the gallery, stopping at each display case, telling Martyr the story of each acquisition, how he first heard the voice, what struck him, how he arranged the meeting and the operation, and he spoke about it with such enthusiasm and warmth as if he were talking about his beloved children or precious works of art.
He explained that collecting recordings did not satisfy him because recordings were dead reflections of a living phenomenon. Whereas owning the physical source of the sound gave him a sense of true ownership, the knowledge that these voices would never be heard publicly again, that he was the last person to hear them in their full power.
The shake approached Martha’s display case, placed his hand on the glass, and said that her voice was special even among this select collection, that he had listened to the recording of her concert dozens of times, and each time discovered new nuances, new layers of emotional depth. He added that he understood her anger and despair, but that in time she would realize the honor of being part of something greater than an ordinary singing career, which would have ended in 20 years with the loss of her voice due to age. Whereas now her
voice was preserved in perfect condition forever, and thousands of years later, when her name is forgotten by all but a few specialists, her vocal cords will still exist as evidence of her gift. Martha listened to this nonsense and felt not just rage growing inside her, but a cold, focused hatred she had never felt before.
She realized that this man was completely insane, that he sincerely believed in the nobility of his project, that no arguments would reach him, because in his world view, he was not a kidnapper and torturer, but a guardian of beauty, saving unique voices from inevitable destruction by time. Fisel signaled that the tour was over and they returned upstairs.
But as Martha was led down the corridor back to her cell, she memorized every turn, every door, every detail of the layout, because the decision had already matured in her mind. If she couldn’t get her voice back, if she couldn’t escape and tell the world about this horror, then at least she would try to destroy the one who had done it.
On the night of November 24th, Martha lay on her bed and waited. Fisizel had mentioned during the tour that the shake often came down to the gallery late at night to listen to his collection in silence and solitude, and Martha decided that this was her only chance. Around midnight, she heard footsteps in the hallway, heavy and slow, recognizable as the Shakes’s gate.
Then the footsteps stopped. He had entered the gallery as expected. Martha got up, went to the door, and began to bang on it with her hands, scratching the metal, making as much noise as she could without using her voice. And after a few minutes, the door opened, and a security guard stood in the doorway.
A young man in uniform with an irritated expression on his face. Martha fell to the floor, grabbed her throat, pretended to be choking, and rolled around on the floor in convulsions. The guard was confused, not understanding what was happening, and bent down to check on her.
At that moment, Martha grabbed the only hard object in the cell from the table, the metal bowl in which food was brought, and hit the guard on the head with all her might. The blow was glancing, not very strong, but unexpected, and the guard staggered, dropping his radio, and Martha jumped out into the corridor and ran towards the gallery, her bare feet slapping against the concrete, air whistling through her tracheosttomy.
But she ran fast, fueled by despair and hatred. She burst into the gallery where Shik Rasheed was standing in front of one of the display cases wearing headphones listening to a recording and unaware of her approach and Martha threw herself at him from behind hitting him in the back. He fell. His headphones fell off.
He tried to get up but she jumped on him, started hitting him in the face with her hands, scratching him, aiming for his eyes. The shake was older and physically weaker, but he was a man and quickly realized what was happening. Grabbed Martha by the wrists, pushed her away. They both got to their feet.
She lunged at him again, but he dodged. And then Martha grabbed one of the display cases, tried to lift it to throw it at the shake, but the display case was too heavy. So instead, she broke the glass with her hand, grabbed a flask containing someone’s vocal cords, and threw it at the shake. The flask smashed against the wall.
Formaldahhide spilled onto the floor, and the cords fell onto the parquet. The shake let out a sound like the roar of a wounded animal, rushed to the broken flask, fell to his knees, and tried to pick up the vocal cords, but they slipped through his fingers. And that gave Martha a second’s advantage.
She ran up, kicked him in the side. He fell sideways, and she jumped on him, trying to clamp her hands around his throat and strangle him, but she didn’t have enough strength. The shake rolled over, threw her off, stood up, and his face no longer bore the calm of a collector. Only the animal rage of a man whose greatest treasure had been destroyed.
He grabbed Martha by the neck with one hand, lifted her up, pressed her against the wall, and she scratched his hands, trying to break free, but he was much stronger than he looked. He looked her in the eyes, and Martha saw that he was going to kill her, not as punishment or in self-defense, but as the destruction of a damaged exhibit that had lost its value.
And in the next second, he turned her around, grabbed her by the head, and jerked her sharply to the side. Martha heard a crack, felt a sharp pain piercing her entire body from neck to toe, then numbness. Her legs gave way, and she fell to the floor, unable to move her arms or legs. The shake stood over her, breathing heavily, adjusting his clothes, then called Fisel, who appeared a few seconds later with two guards, looked at Martha, lying on the floor, at the broken display case, at the spilled formaldahhide.
Fisizel asked what to do, and the shake replied coldly that it should be reported as an accident. The Spanish singer had fallen in the bathroom, hit her head, broken her neck. a tragic accident during a private visit and the body would be returned to the family with appropriate compensation and condolences.
Marta lay on the floor unable to move, but she could breathe. She could hear. She could see them discussing her death and she understood that she was dying slowly, the paralysis rising higher, her breathing becoming shallow, the air struggling to pass through the tracheosttomy, and in a few minutes she would suffocate. The shake ordered the body to be taken to a soundproof room on the lower level where operations had previously been performed, a room that had recently been converted into a private archive of records and left there for a day while
he decided how to stage the accident so that there would be no questions from the Spanish authorities. The guards lifted Marta. She was still alive, her eyes moving, watching what was happening. And Fisizel noticed this and told the shake that she was still breathing. But the shake replied indifferently, that it would not be for long.
A fracture of the cervical vertebrae at this level meant gradual paralysis of the respiratory muscles. She would die on her own within an hour, maybe two. So there was no need to speed up the process and leave additional traces of violence on her body. The guards carried Martha downstairs to a small room with perfect soundproofing, laid her on a metal table that had previously been used as an operating table, and left her alone, locking the door behind them.
There was a sound system in the room, and someone from the staff, apparently on the shakes’s orders, turned on a recording. Martha’s last concert, her performance at the gallery 8 days ago, and her own voice filled the room, clear, strong, alive, singing about love and loss in Spanish. Marta lay on the table, paralyzed, unable even to turn her head, staring at the white ceiling, listening to her voice coming from the speakers.
And it was the crulest torture imaginable to die to the sounds of what had been taken from her, to hear her singing. Knowing she would never sing another note, her breathing became heavier and heavier. The air passed through the tracheosttomy in jerks. Less and less oxygen entered her lungs.
Darkness crept into the corners of her vision, but her consciousness still held, and Martha heard her voice soar to a high note. Hold it. Release it. Move on to the next phrase. The recording lasted 2 hours. It was put on repeat. And when Martha died about an hour after being placed on the table, suffocating from respiratory muscle paralysis, her voice still echoed in the room, singing and singing in complete darkness in a soundproof dungeon where no one could hear it except the dead singer on the operating table. On November 27th, Marta Rivero’s
body was delivered to the Spanish authorities with an official apology from representatives of the Al-Nion family. an explanation of a tragic accident in the bathroom and compensation to the family in the amount of €500,000. An autopsy performed in Seville confirmed death from a broken neck, but also found evidence of recent surgery on the larynx, removal of the vocal cords, and a tracheotomy, which raised questions for the pathologist.
Marta’s family demanded an investigation, claiming that their daughter was healthy when she flew to Dubai and should not have had any throat surgery. But the United Arab Emirates authorities refused to cooperate with the investigation, citing the diplomatic immunity of members of the ruling families and the lack of evidence of a crime.
The case was closed after 3 months as an accident and the Spanish media wrote several articles about the mysterious death of the talented singer in Dubai. But the story quickly disappeared from the news, replaced by more recent scandals. Marta’s agent Carlos tried to attract the attention of international human rights organizations.
But without concrete evidence and without access to the shakes’s residence, nothing could be done. And in the end, he also gave up, leaving only a short post on social media saying that talented artists should be careful when accepting invitations from wealthy strangers in countries where the laws do not work the same way as in Europe.
Shik Rashid continued to build his collection with the 25th exhibit being a tenor from South Africa acquired in May 2024 and the 26th being a contralto from Germany in August of the same year and none of them were ever found alive or dead again. They simply disappeared after private performances in the residences of wealthy collectors.
Their cases remained unsolved, their voices silenced forever. The display case with Martha Rivero’s vocal cords still stands in Shik Rasheed’s gallery. The glass flask filled with fresh formaldahhide, two small strips of pinkish fabric floating in the yellowish liquid, and a copper plaque stating that this voice was one of the most beautiful in the collection, a voice that sounded like molten gold and broken glass, and which now belongs to only one person forever.
