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!

October 2017, United Arab Emirates, 30 km south of Dubai.  On Friday, around 6 a.m., a local shepherd walking through the desert near the dry bed of the Wadibashar River saw the body of a woman lying in the sand.  The corpse lay on its side, partially covered with a piece of cloth, its fingers burned and clenched in a spasm.

  She had hardly any clothes left.  His face was disfigured by the blows.  The police arrived 37 minutes later.  At 9 a.m., the area was cordoned off.  A forensic team was working at the scene, and people wearing masks and backpacks were crawling around collecting evidence.  Images taken by a drone and published the next day on a private Telegram channel clearly show that the body had not been moved by the wind or animals, since it had been abandoned there.

  At first, everything followed the typical script of local crime news.  An anonymous victim, heat, trampled sand. But a name emerged the next day.  The Canadian embassy confirmed the identity.  The young woman was Noemí Sharpentier, 22, a Canadian citizen from Montreal, a fashion student at the University of Quebec, and a temporary resident in the United Arab Emirates on an internship visa.

  She had arrived as part of an international internship program between the university and a private company called Myon R. Six days earlier, on October 15, Noemí stopped communicating with her parents.  The last message recorded in his messaging system was, “I have a meeting today. I have to behave formally. I ca n’t miss it.

”  According to your provider, this message was sent at 3:08 pm.  Nine minutes later, his phone turned off. His location was traced to a villa on the outskirts of the Albarsha district.  It was a house with white walls and a high concrete wall. According to the Interior Ministry, the street CCTV cameras were not working due to technical failures.

Noemí entered the house alone.  He didn’t come out. An official press release issued by the Emirati police on October 23 stated that the cause of death was heatstroke.  The ambient temperature that day reached 41ºC. According to the forensic report, there were no signs of open wounds on the body, except for partially burned fingers.

Police found no signs of violent death.  The investigation was closed.  The body was handed over for repatriation, but in Montreal the parents were not satisfied with the heat stroke explanation.  They insisted on a second exam.  The second report was ready in 11 days.  It was carried out by three independent forensic experts from Quebec and Toronto.

According to their conclusions, Noemi’s death was caused by mechanical asphyxiation, that is, by suffocation.  In addition, signs of restraint were found on the body, characteristic bruises on the ankles and wrists.  And most importantly, the internal organs were missing . The liver, kidneys, and one kidney had been surgically removed.

   They had been cut with great precision, without any signs of laeration.   It wasn’t the work of animals, it was a surgical procedure.  This was soon reported by The Globe and Mail and Le Devoir. Photos surfaced, the report was leaked, and his father was interviewed. Canadian journalists requested the case files from the United Arab Emirates, but were denied.

Requests to the private company Myon Arrow went unanswered.  None of the employees of the Fashion House that had hired Noemí as an intern showed up.  The phones are not available.  The website has been removed.  The Dubai office has been unveiled.  According to information obtained by French journalist Frederick Buso, Mesoner was registered through an offshore company in the Virgin Islands.

  The sole nominal owner is a 30-year-old Czech citizen living in Prague who, it later emerged, has no connection to the fashion industry.  The University of Montreal confirmed that the internship program existed.  However, the legal basis of the contract turned out to be extremely vague.  It was signed in 2015 at the faculty level without the approval of the university’s legal department.

Correspondence with the host party was conducted through unofficial email addresses .  None of the department’s employees, including the internship coordinator, had ever met in person with representatives from Mason Air. New details soon began to emerge .  According to the Borderless Investigations Independent Journalism Association , in the last 4 years at least 15 students from France, Italy, Canada and South Korea have participated in a similar internship program.

Open sources indicate that they have all returned.  However, it has not been possible to establish contact with them. Their social media profiles have been deleted.  Their phones are inactive and even the Google CCH files are empty.  Some of the names, it has been discovered, were pseudonyms.

  According to information from the International Centre for Missing Persons, several girls are also listed as missing, but with different dates and in different countries. The investigation begins to take a different turn.  Noemí’s parents are asking Canadian federal authorities to launch an international investigation. A special unit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is involved.

A working group is formed. Journalists find a new clue. One of the internship contracts with Maison R was signed on behalf of an office located in Geneva, Switzerland.  In November, a month after the discovery of the body, Frederick Besot receives a document, an extract from the Swiss register showing that Meson R has another subsidiary.

  Rlaps AG, registered as a biotechnology research center. The address is an industrial area on the outskirts of the USA, the same legal owner, the same offshore chains.  Journalists are beginning to join forces.  In Paris, Montreal, Geneva, a new version emerges.  The practices may have been a cover for transporting women to the United Arab Emirates to undergo unauthorized medical procedures.

organ trafficking, experiments, elite clinics.  But all of this is nothing more than speculation. At this stage, the statements of the Emirati police officially stand. Heatstroke.  Natural causes.  Case closed.  Noemí’s body was buried in Montreal under the supervision of municipal authorities.

  But his family continues to seek a new investigation.  They don’t need an explanation.  They want the truth, and that apparently isn’t limited to a corpse.  The investigation resumed with an attempt to establish Noemi Sharpentier’s movements in the first few days after her arrival in Dubai. According to information provided by the  UAE Immigration Service, the young woman arrived in the country on October 9, 2017 on an Emirates flight from Toronto with a stopover in Amsterdam at the Dubai airport passport control.

He indicated the Millenium Al Barsha hotel as his temporary address , which was confirmed by the hotel records. The hotel cameras recorded his arrival every day until October 15th.  That day, at 2:50 p.m., he left the building, got into a white car with tinted windows, and drove away.  The license plate is illegible.

  This video recording was the last confirmed visual contact with Noemi.  The next day, the program coordinator in Montreal, Marie Claire Dubois, received a message from an unknown user sent from a temporary Telegram account.  It said, “Your student has cancelled her participation. The reasons are personal. Remove her from the program.

Confirm.”  Dubois ignored the message. He decided it was a mistake and didn’t think much of it .  He only found out about the young woman’s disappearance when her parents contacted the university 4 days later.  It was then discovered that Noemí’s email could not be accessed and that her WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger accounts had been blocked.

  Their Instagram and Twitter accounts were deleted in less than an hour on the afternoon of October 15.  The IP address from which the deletion was made belonged to a corporate network in the Dubai Marina area, registered to a company dedicated to logistics and pharmaceutical supplies. Meanwhile, a local investigation has been launched in Quebec.

Press journalists have contacted two former interns who worked at the same organization in 2016. One of them, whose name has not been revealed, agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.  According to her, the conditions of her stay were strange.  The participants were housed separately and were not allowed to have contact with each other outside the office.

  Their movements were monitored and their personal phones were confiscated for the entire duration of the internship, citing the confidentiality policy. The contract contained a clause on medical authorization in which the signatory accepted procedures to assess stress resistance.  and the emotional response.

  Upon arrival in Dubai, the participants were examined by a man who presented himself as a doctor from a clinic at the consulting center.  Afterwards, several of them were taken to a separate location where they participated in private shows.  The young woman did not give further details, claiming that she had signed a confidentiality agreement under threat of a fine and a lifetime ban from working in the sector.

  By then, an investigation by journalists from the ECB and the French publication Mediaapart had revealed that these practices were not only carried out in Dubai. A similar structure with the same communication style, similar contracts, and the same email addresses had already appeared in Italy in the 2000s and in Turkey in 2011.

  In both cases, information came to light about participants who disappeared in Istanbul.  One of the students, a Spanish national, disappeared without a trace days after her arrival.  The case was closed citing a possible escape.  It was later revealed that two years later he appeared under a different name on the list of Dubai scholarship recipients.

  From there, his trail went cold.  Expanding the geographical scope of the investigation, the Borderless Investigations group began comparing company records.  Through publicly accessible offshore companies, they were able to establish a chain.  Mason R was part of a larger network involving at least nine legal entities in Panama, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Estonia.

They are all linked through a single administrator, a Lebanese citizen named Mahmud Aruni.  Aruni was listed as the director of six entities, including the company that owned the car that took Noemí.  Aruni was registered as an international logistics specialist licensed 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 that year.  The letter referred to unusual financial activity in an account belonging to RLABS AG. Transfers totaling more than 2 million euros were made to the United Arab Emirates , Lebanon, and South Africa.

  The destination of the payments was listed as research needs, private medical expenses, and business consulting.  The beneficiaries were three names that had not previously appeared in the press.  Two of them enjoyed diplomatic immunity.  In December 2017, a man was arrested in Amsterdam while trying to fly to Qatar with a fake passport.

  A check revealed that he was using a Polish identity document, but his fingerprints matched those in the Interpol database.  It turned out to be Piero Matzini, an Italian who had previously worked for an international pharmaceutical company and was fired in 2014 after being accused of drug smuggling.  Matzini admitted that since 2005 he had been working with several private clinics specializing in palliative surgery and transplantology and that his work had always been related to the logistics of corpses.

  He denied any connection with Noemí Sharpentiera, but photos of documents with the girl’s name were found on his phone.  One of them was a page from an internship application form with her signature and the date.  His family confirmed its authenticity.  On his laptop’s hard drive was a file containing correspondence with representatives of RL LAPS that referenced the series 27.

 This term would later appear in another investigation, this time in Africa, where  unofficial clinical trials were being conducted with a drug that suppresses the immune response in patients after an organ transplant. While these details were being compiled into a dossier, everything officially remained the same in Dubai.

  The case was closed, there was no evidence, and foreign journalists were restricted from entering the country . In January 2018, the Canadian embassy issued a second statement demanding transparency and cooperation with an international investigation.   There was no response from the Emirates, but at that moment a key witness appeared.

  The name of the woman who decided to speak out was not initially revealed.  In the documents she appeared as Sara A. Later, after consulting 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 former student of a London design school .

  According to her, in the spring of 2016 she participated in an internship at Myonerre after being selected in an internal competition at her faculty.  The program included a three- week stay in Dubai, accommodation, transport and participation in the preparation of a private fashion show .  According to Sara, the reality turned out to be completely different.

  Upon arriving in Dubai, she was not accommodated in a hotel, as indicated 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.  All of their phones were confiscated during the confidential training period.

  The windows were covered with thick curtains. A security guard was watching your movements.  Every morning a car came to pick up the girls and take them to the center.  Sara remembers that the place looked like a laboratory. White walls, steel doors, no signs, and employees in uniforms without identification.   On the second day of their stay, they had blood drawn, tests done, and an ultrasound performed.

  They didn’t explain why.  Later, the girl was invited to a consultation where she was told she had excellent parameters and was offered a voluntary medical procedure in exchange for a large reward.  She refused. According to her, the Argentine woman disappeared on the third day .  He left his belongings, but the bed was perfectly made, as if he had never been there.

  No one answered their questions.  Two days later, the French woman fell ill.  He had a fever and seizures.  They took her away and she was never seen again .  On the seventh day of her stay, Sara tried to escape.  At night she escaped through a service window and ran towards a residential neighborhood where a local woman picked her up .

  The next day, the girl found herself at the British consulate.   She has remained hidden ever since.  He was strongly advised not to contact the UAE Police.  His testimony was crucial.  Following the publication of his interview on the BBC, British law enforcement submitted a request to Interpol. Based on his testimony, an international investigation was launched into the activities of Mason Air and all related structures.

Canadian researchers confirmed the veracity of their data, including the location of the houses, the license plate numbers of the cars, and the internal layout of the center where the tests were conducted. Sara’s testimony also coincided with the conclusions of Swiss journalists who at that time had discovered a presentation by Relaps AG in the archives of the Geneva Chamber of Commerce , in which, under the pretext of ethical biomedical research, the work with donors between 20 and 30 years old who had given their

consent to participate in research involving invasive procedures was described.  Two months later, information was obtained about the transport of medical samples from the United Arab Emirates to Geneva.  The documents leaked by a customs informant contained references to category B organic samples sent to a clinic whose license had been suspended in 2012 following the publication of data on unauthorized transplants in 199 patients in Saudi Arabia.

  The license was reinstated 3 years later .  In March 2018, Félix Vanerh, a Belgian doctor listed as a consultant for RL LAPS AG, was arrested in Geneva. Thirty-four files on young women were found on his laptop , including photos of Noemí Charpentier.  The documents included scanned copies of questionnaires, medical histories, instructions for preparing for procedures, and signatures in Arabic.

  According to experts, the signatures may have been forged. Van Osterhout himself stated that he was unaware of the violent nature of the procedures and that he worked under contract with private clinics without asking questions.  The testimony of Osterhaute, Sarah Arnold and the laptop documents formed the basis of the first criminal case opened in Switzerland under the article Trafficking in Human Beings for Medical Purposes.

  This was the first case in Europe in which investigators recognized 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 its center was a man whose name appeared in the reports under the pseudonym Rafael S. It was later revealed that he was Rafael Sadec, a French citizen and former employee of a private pharmaceutical company who had been fired for falsifying clinical data.  in the United Arab Emirates .  He was a member of the Board of Directors of R Global, a company registered in the Dubai free economic zone .

  However, when the investigation began, Rafael Sadec had disappeared.  His last known location was Abu Dhabi airport, where he boarded a flight to Johannesburg.  At the beginning of 2021 he was on the wanted list, but was not officially detained.  In May 2019, the trial against RLAPS began in a Swiss federal court.

  Of the 16 accused, seven were arrested.  The rest were tried in absentia.  Among them were two doctors, a logistics specialist, a translator, and a citizen of the United Arab Emirates, a former employee of a state clinic.  The trial lasted more than 6 months.  The case file mentioned at least 41 victims, including Noemí and Sharpentier.

Only eight of them were officially identified. The rest were listed as unidentified donors .  The prosecution requested that the organization be recognized as a criminal group that operated under the guise of educational institutions. The sentences were handed down in December 2019 .

  Van Osterh was sentenced to 8 years.  The company secretary received a 5-year sentence.  The others received sentences of between 3 and 6 years in prison.  The court acknowledged that the activities were criminal, but did not establish the full composition of the group.  Rafael Sadec remained free.  Noemí’s case was not formally reclassified.

The United Arab Emirates refused to hand over the case files or acknowledge the results of the independent investigation.  It seemed that everything was over.  But two months later, Lemond received a USB drive with an encrypted file.  He had been sent from South Africa.  Inside there were videos recorded with a hidden camera.

  One of them showed a woman resembling Naomi, sitting in a room tied up with straps.  In the background, uniformed medical personnel without badges could be seen.  The video was dated October 16, the day after her disappearance.  The USB drive sent to the Elemont newsroom became a key element that cast doubt on the official version of Noemí Charpentier’s death .

  After decryption, forensic computer experts confirmed the authenticity of the metadata.  The recordings had not been edited and had been made with a miniature camera with automatic date and time stamping.  The first video recording lasted 15 minutes.  The camera was fixed, presumably under a table or a medical stretcher. The shot shows a room with gray walls, a metal wardrobe, and a stretcher.

  A girl in hospital clothes is tied to a chair.  Her face is bruised, but her parents identified her.   It was Noemi.  He was conscious and trying to say something.  Four minutes later, two people in white coats and masks appeared in the frame.  One of them was a man with a distinctive limp in his right leg.

  He reviewed some documents and gave instructions in English.  Under anesthesia, series 27. The recording then stops.  There were eight videos on the USB drive.  Five of them were documentary images of medical procedures performed without sterile conditions and with serious ethical violations.

  In the background, orders can be heard in English, French, and Arabic.  In some videos, the patients do not move, either because they are under anesthesia or because they are dead.  One of the files shows the moment when an organ, a kidney, is removed and placed in a container. The plastic box has a sticker with the logo of a private clinic in Cape Town.

  This institution did not have an official license to perform transplants.  According to information obtained from a former Interpol employee, later a political refugee in Germany, similar files had been recorded in closed investigations into illegal organ trafficking in Central Asia. Some of the people who appear in the video footage also appeared in operational reports in Türkiye, Kenya, and Kosovo.

  However, none of the cases reached the courts due to a lack of direct evidence or interference from local authorities. The USB drive was sent via a private courier company in an envelope with no return address.  The only clue was a South African postmark and a fingerprint that matched that of a woman named Nomulet Lamini, who had previously worked as a nurse at the private Gordon Medical clinic in Pretoria.

  Her address was listed in a police report filed after her disappearance in October 2019. Her whereabouts have been unknown ever since. Lemonde handed the file over to the Swiss prosecutor’s office .  The documents were also shown to Noemi’s parents.  They filed a new lawsuit against the United Arab Emirates, demanding official recognition of the murder.

 Canada’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a strongly worded statement calling Dubai’s refusal to cooperate in the investigation unacceptable and contrary to the foundations of international law. However, there was no response from the Emirates.  The statement from the Emirati Ministry of the Interior merely reiterated that the case is closed due to a lack of evidence of a crime and that the interference of foreign entities is not provided for under the legislation of the United Arab Emirates .  Meanwhile, in London,

Channel 4 journalists obtained a copy of an internal report from a non-governmental organization working in East Africa.  which described cases of medical expeditions by European specialists to Eswatini and Lesotho.  The documents contained names that matched those of people involved in the Rlaps case.

  One of them was Rafael Sadec.  According to local informants, he was in southern Africa under a false name, using a fake Portuguese passport. By the end of 2020, the investigation had taken on the characteristics of an international scandal.  However, from a legal point of view, many elements proved impossible to demonstrate.

  The USB drive could not be accepted as evidence in several countries due to the impossibility of establishing its origin and the legality of the images.  The people who appear in the video have not been officially identified.  Medical institutions in South Africa and the United Arab Emirates declined to comment. The key figures continued to hide.

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

  However, the document was never officially published; it was considered sensitive due to the potential diplomatic consequences. To date, no state has acknowledged the existence of a systematic human trafficking network involving R. However, several organizations, including Interpol, the WHO, and the Council of Europe, have confirmed the need to establish mechanisms to monitor international student mobility programs.

  The story of Noemi Sharpentier remains an example of how the inadequacy of international mechanisms allows shadowy structures to operate for many years. Trust in educational programs, the lack of intergovernmental verification of companies, and the unwillingness of some countries to cooperate with international investigations create ideal conditions for exploitation and the cover-up of crimes.

  Noemí’s family continues to fight to have the case reopened.  By June 2025, more than 300,000 people had signed their petition. However, none of the official UAE authorities have reviewed the case.  The death certificate still states that the cause of death was heat stroke.  And while new information continues 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 scam, and behind the shiny facade there may be a windowless room where no

one can hear you scream.  M.