7 MAR 2019
She disappeared almost 25 years ago - this is what Fatemeh Hassani could look like now
(Actual photo from 1995. Click on image to enlarge)
In the summer of 1995, teenager Fatemeh Hassani walked out of her home in Manchester on her way to college - she was never seen again.
A month after her mysterious disappearance the phone rang at Fatemeh’s family home in Chorlton-on-Medlock. The line was slightly muffled, but Mehdi Khodabakhsh could clearly hear his 16-year-old sister Fatemeh crying on the other end of the line.
Speaking to her siblings through tears, Fatemeh told them how much she missed them, but refused to say where she was calling from.
Then just a child himself, Mehdi called for his mum Khadijeh Khodabakhsh.
She was desperate to hear from her missing daughter and rushed to the phone, only to hear the dull sound of a dial tone.
When Fatemeh - who also went by the name ‘Asefeh’ or ‘Asifa’ - left home she had scrawled an emotional note on the living room wall which was hidden behind a wrestling poster. It read: “Dear parents, don’t worry about me I’m 17 now” and “Mum I will never forgive you”.
In the weeks and months that came after her mysterious disappearance, Fatemeh’s bereft family turned to police, a private detective and even a palm reader in a bid to find her.
But they have heard nothing since that fateful day, almost 25 years ago.
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Her family say it’s as if Fatemeh disappeared off the face of the earth. They have clung to that last phone call, the note scrawled on the wall and the first name of a boyfriend she had as the last pieces of information about her life.
In May 1995, when Fatemeh went missing, she was studying at the Manchester College.
According to her family she may have been under pressure and had argued with her parents in the run up to her disappearance.
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Last year Khadijehtold the M.E.N that she still thinks of her daughter every day.
She said: "I have never moved from this house in case she comes back. “I just want her to know that I love her. I made a mistake because I think I was very strict with her.
“Every day I pray and ask god to help her and have news from her. I just want her to be safe. “If she doesn’t want to see me, her brothers and sister have a right to have their sister back. I know inside they are hurting.
“My children are very close and caring to each other and to me. Our family circumstances are completely changed. The door is open.”
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Fatemeh and her family moved to the UK from Iran in 1991 so her father could study for a PhD at the University of Manchester.
The young Fatemeh, her brothers and sister all attended school and college in Manchester and had made friends in the city.
At the time of her disappearance, Fatemeh had also been seeing a boy called Brian from The Manchester College’s Shena Simon campus, which had caused arguments with her family.
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In the midst of those family tensions, Fatemeh told her younger brother Mehdi, then 15, that she was planning to run away. He didn’t believe her.
“She said she was going to run away with that boy,” he previously said.
Mehdi believes his sister’s plans were forced to change when the relationship ended.
But she still ran away from home - leaving with just a few clothes in a small suitcase, no money and no way of accessing money.
“I said goodbye, she hugged me and everything. The next day I came back to school she was gone.”
Mehdi says Fatemeh had been keen to study fashion and had argued with her parents about school.
He added: “The night before she was going to run away she told me and said ‘I’m going to leave, it’s okay’. I didn’t think to myself she would actually do it. I went to school and came back and she was not here and that really shook me.
“She had told me she was going to write on the wall. There was a poster of a wrestling guy and when I came home she had already removed it and there was something written there.”
Though her family find it difficult to remember the exact wording of that handwritten message, there are extracts they recall clearly.
“When she left she wrote on the wall ‘Dear parents, don’t worry about me I’m 17 now’. But at the bottom she said ‘Mum I will never forgive you’,” Khadijeh said.
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Police believe that the missing teenager phoned her family a month later from a premises in Longsight.
Her family were, at the time, told by officers that she had spent her first night away from home at an address on Hammerstone Road, in Longsight.
Records on the case are incomplete and there are no internet or phone records relating to the case. So Helen and Julie have requestioned Khadijeh and Mehdi about their memories of that time.
National Insurance records and financial checks have been run but it does not appear that Fatemeh ever applied for a loan or a credit card in her name.
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Back in the 1990s, Fatemeh’s father - who is now divorced from Khadijeh - even hired a private detective in the hope of finding her. He has told police that he was strict with his daughter but did everything he could to find her.
Khadijeh, who still struggles with the loss, even went to a palm reader in the hope of finding out something about Fatemeh’s whereabouts.
“I have been told she is alive and working and she is happy with her life and that’s it. But none of them told me anything about my daughter,” she said.
It is not thought that Fatemeh went back to Iran and the family have trawled social media sites in hope of finding her, to no avail.
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A few days before her disappearance Khadijeh and Fatemeh had argued. The following day, when they had made up, Khadijeh took her daughter shopping with the little money she had left in her purse - just £13. She bought sunglasses, trousers and hair colour and they came home.
Then on May 11, 1995, Khadijeh left home in the morning to attend a computer course. She had expected Fatemeh to go straight to college, but when she arrived home shortly after 3pm the garden gate was open and Fatemeh was gone. After nervous phone calls to college friends, Fatemeh was reported missing to police.
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When her exam results arrived a few weeks later Fatemeh was not there to receive them. The grades, which were instead collected by her mum, are the last trace Fatemeh left of her former life in Manchester.
The teenager called the house about a month later but Khadijeh never got a chance to speak to her daughter again.
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Fatemeh is described as being of Middle Eastern appearance, 5ft 5ins tall, of a medium build with black hair and dark brown eyes. She has a 1cm scar on her forehead and has pierced ears.
She would now be 40 years old. As well as Fatemeh she also went by the name ‘Asefeh’ or ‘Asifa’.
If you have seen Fatemeh or have any information about her whereabouts please call the National Missing Persons Helpline on 116 000 or GMP on 101.
Police are also keen to speak to Fatemeh’s former boyfriend from the time, known only as Brian.
She disappeared almost 25 years ago - this is what Fatemeh Hassani could look like now
Edit by me: Just to add, whole article refer to her as Fatemeh. I think correct spelling would be Fatima. Her official name is though Asifa Hassani.
