The story of the assassination of Yemeni President Hamdi .. A critical review of the movie "The Last Lunch"

In the 2011 demonstrations in Yemen, citizens succeeded in transferring their demanding grievances toward power to the sit-in squads, echoing revolutionary slogans that raise questions about the three-decade-old years of Ali Abdullah Saleh's rule. The issue of the assassination of Ibrahim al-Hamdi - in October 1977 - was the most important question raised in the demonstrations in Sana'a and other northern cities such as Taiz.

The witness here is that Ibrahim Al-Hamdi became president of the Yemen Arab Republic in the wake of a white coup that took place in July 1974. Thus, Al-Hamdi became a charismatic leader who is popular and widely respected in Yemen, given the reforms he introduced during his short service as head of state, he worked to fight corruption and inaugurate Equal system.

After the assassination of al-Hamdi in the fall of 1977, Ahmad al-Ghashmi - his deputy in power and then his successor in the presidency of the state - created a strange story to justify the assassination, and its interpretation as a suicide crime that killed him with his brother Abdullah Al-Hamdi and Moman, who came from France.

At the end of the 1970s, there were many rumors in Sana'a that the authority had found the bodies of President Hamdi and his brother, along with the bodies of two French girls in a bedroom. Of course, the Al-Hamdi family and its supporters within the government did not believe these rumors or the official version of the state. Rather, they remained convinced that Al-Hamdi was killed by his political enemies, specifically Al-Gashmi and Ali Abdullah Saleh, Al-Gashmi’s deputy and his successor in power after that. They also realized that the authority had thrown the story of the two prostitutes in the official version of the destruction of Hamdi's reputation.

Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power in July 1978, shortly after the assassination of al-Ghshmi by an explosive device inside his office, that was carried by a representative of the South Yemen government inside his bag. When people took to the streets in 2011 to protest the Saleh government, many of them began uploading large posters bearing pictures of Ibrahim al-Hamdi, accusing President Saleh and his inner circle of assassinating al-Hamdi three decades ago.

And since the Arab Spring came in the era of social media, it has become possible for revolutionary protesters to publish their demands and communicate them to a wide audience, through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. In this context, Hamdi's ancient supporters seized the opportunity and recorded interviews with members of the Hamdi family, who this time found the courage to express their narration of what happened in 1977.

Thus, Yemenis for the first time heard statements of public accusations against Saleh and members of his government in the Hamdi assassination case. Thereafter, several personalities emerged to provide testimony on this issue, including President Saleh himself shortly after being forced to resign in late November 2011.

In his testimony, Saleh denied that he played any role in the assassination, and blamed hired agents for Saudi Arabia. In addition, prior to his assassination in December 2017 by Houthi forces, Saleh threatened that he would reveal information related to many of the crimes that had occurred in Yemen in the past.

On Sunday April 28, 2019, Al-Jazeera broadcast a investigative investigation dealing with the story of the assassination of Al-Hamdi by reviewing the available evidence on the case, which will open new horizons in the details of the political circumstances surrounding the assassination issue, after all these years have passed.

It is worth noting that the one-hour documentary in Arabic entitled "The Last Lunch: The Story of the Assassination of Hamdi", which was prepared and directed by Jamal Al-Maliki, who spent years closely following the sources and evidence related to the assassination story. The preparation of the film required searching in archive records, and previewing American and British diplomatic documents and reports, to understand the information that was circulated by foreign governments at the time of the assassination of Hamdi.

The film included more than a dozen interviews with former Yemeni officials, including Abdullah al-Hakimi, a spokesman for the Presidential Council of the al-Hamdi government, as well as interviews with the president's own guards, who were accompanying him on the day of the assassination. The film also included an artistic depiction of what happened in the house of Al-Ghashmi, as the place where Al-Hamdi was last seen accompanied by Al-Ghashmi and Saleh. It should be noted here that Saleh himself was living in a neighboring house with a shared back garden connected to the home of Al-Ghashmi.

On the day that Al-Hamdi was assassinated, according to the film, Al-Ghashmi invited President Hamdi to lunch with him at his home, accompanied by guests, including the Prime Minister and members of the Council of Ministers. However, Al-Hamdi seems to have forgotten about the invitation and had lunch at his home, so he arrived late and apologized for not eating with guests at Al-Ghshmi's house. One of the guests of this banquet later recounted the story. He mentioned that he saw Al-Hamdi the last time he was walking into the back room with Al-Ghashami and Saleh.

At this point in the movie, Ali al-Sultan, President Hamdi's bodyguard, tells that he stayed with his colleagues at the gate outside al-Ghashami's house while awaiting the president's exit. When the president did not leave after several hours, the Sultan decided to enter the house to inquire about the President. The Sultan adds that the guards of al-Ghshmi claimed that the president left the house through the back gate of the house.

The film revealed that Al-Ghashami and Saleh were, without any doubt, responsible for the assassination of Al-Hamdi, his brother, and the two French girls, in addition to other names that are likely to be involved in the assassination, such as Mohamed Al-Hawry, one of Al-Ghashami's guards. He is in fact the only suspect among the accused characters, who were alive at the time of the production of the film. The director, Jamal Al-Maleky, said that he tried to contact Al-Hawry - in order to interview him for the film - but that he did not respond.

Moreover, Al-Maliki traveled to France for an interview with French researchers, to confirm information that the two French prostitutes had a good relationship with an employee of the French intelligence, and that he was the one who made arrangements for their travel to Yemen. One of these researchers is called Frank Mirmar, and he is considered a known French researcher in Yemeni affairs, and he has been running the French Center for Yemeni Studies in Sana'a for several years.

In his testimony broadcast on the film, Mirmar concluded that French intelligence and the two girls had nothing to do with the assassination plot in Yemen. Other film testimonies indicate that the murder of the two women was a foolish attempt to cover up the crime, and to suggest that Hamdi's death was the result of a sexual scandal that brought together the two prostitutes and his brother.

The Al-Jazeera film is not satisfied with answering the questions related to who carried out the assassination of Al-Hamdi, but rather goes further to shed light on the motives behind the crime, describing the political situation in Yemen during the last year of Al-Hamdi’s rule, especially his courageous diplomatic initiative aimed at achieving unity with South Yemen.

Moreover, the film indicates that President Al-Hamdi has been looking - since his coming to power in 1974 - to build a strong national economy, and considered this a condition for achieving full national independence, which will gradually qualify Yemen to play a strategic role in the southern Red Sea region.

The film states that President al-Hamdi met - for the first time - with his counterpart Salem Rabi` Ali (President of South Yemen) in February 1977, and the meeting took place in a small border city in which al-Hamdi was born (in 1943) called Qadaba. There, the two leaders signed an agreement to form a joint council to discuss prospects for achieving national unity between the two halves of Yemen.

In March 1977, Al-Hamdi organized the Red Sea Summit in Taiz with the participation of presidents from Sudan, southern Yemen, and Somalia. The summary of statements in this axis says that all of Hamdi's policies were of great concern to the Saudi government, because she saw in such a strong alliance between the countries of the South Red Sea - which at the time had strong ties to the Soviet Union - a threat to its interests in the region.

In addition to the above, testimonies from Abdullah Al-Hakimi and government officials - who worked with Al-Hamdi - indicate that the northern president of Yemen (Al-Hamdi) was aware of Saudi concerns, and therefore sought good relations with his northern neighbor. For example, in the aftermath of the Red Sea Summit, Al-Hamdi visited Saudi Arabia in March 1977 to meet with King Khalid bin Abdul Aziz.

In this context, Al-Hakimi - who is one of the President's companions on that visit - recounts that the President told them, saying: "We have always been keen on our relationship with Saudi Arabia ... a neighborly relationship and mutual respect, but it seems that the brothers in the Kingdom do not treat us with this view, but rather They believe that Yemen does not deserve to have a state, nor the president he represents deserves to be president. "

On the other hand, the statements of Jamal Al-Maliki film revealed the reasons that pushed Saudi Arabia to hostility to Al-Hamdi, against the background of the latter's policies aimed at limiting the political influence of the tribes in Yemen, such as his marginalization of Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussein Al-Ahmar, the Sheikh of Sheikhs, gathered the tribes of Hashed, and one of the most important Saudi men in Yemen . Al-Hamdi also refused to settle the issue of the borders with Saudi Arabia, which had remained pending since the 1930s, after Saudi Arabia occupied three provinces in northern Yemen (Jizan, Najran, and Asir), and then arranged a long-term lease contract that would allow them to acquire.

In conclusion, the Al-Jazeera film concludes that it was the Saudi government that essentially ordered the assassination of Ibrahim Al-Hamdi, with the aim of stopping his political initiative in Yemen, in particular to prevent the second meeting that he had been holding with the President of South Yemen in mid-October 1977. Indeed Al-Hamdi was killed a few days before he traveled to that meeting, a meeting at which the two leaders were expected to announce the national unity project.

To reinforce this point, Al-Maliki interviewed Ambassador Edward Ghoneim - Deputy Head of the American Mission in Yemen after the Hamdi period - who assured him that America had doubts that Saudi Arabia paid money - through a tribal mediator in Yemen - to both Ahmed Al-Ghashami and Ali Abdullah Saleh To assassinate Hamdi.

According to Ambassador Ghoneim, in the film, “The Saudis have resorted to one of their proven and effective methods in Yemen, which is to pay money to the tribes that they believe will stand by them. The aim behind this was to create problems for the central government that Hamdi is leading to weaken. [They eventually reached A conviction that he has become a danger to them] and they have removed him from power.

One of the people who hosted the movie was Ahmed Abu Munsar, the leader of the Special Guard of President Ibrahim al-Hamdi. According to his testimony, the Yemeni ambassador in Cairo has received - through his sources in Egypt - information that calls for mistrust in al-Ghashmi, as he seeks to implement his own plans with Saudi Arabia. Abu Munsar adds that he warned President Al-Hamdi against Al-Ghshmi, and conveyed this information to him six or seven months before his assassination. But Al-Hamdi was very confident in Al-Ghasham.

In documenting different views, the film presented a recorded statement by Ali Abdullah Saleh about the assassination of al-Hamdi, which had been broadcast inside Yemen before the assassination of Saleh himself in December 2017. Saleh says - in that statement - that al-Hamdi was killed and conspired by the Saudis And that he supervised the killing of the Saudi military attache, Saleh Al-Hadian.

However, the characters - who were hosted in the film - confirmed the impossibility of Saudi Arabia carrying out the plot to assassinate Al-Hamdi inside his territory, without the help of local agents in Yemen. One of them (Ahmed Al-Qadiri) mentioned - before the end of the movie - that Al-Ghshmi and Saleh were the only two people inside Yemen who were in a position to kill Al-Hamdi.

The evidence presented by "The Last Lunch" is compelling evidence, and therefore this film will remain for many years as the best investigation into the story of the assassination of the President of Yemen in 1977. Moreover, the film was made with great skill and was professionally edited, so that it can display frequent shots of films. Ancient photos from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and other countries in the region attract the attention of viewers as they watch the story of an international conspiracy that still resonates in Middle East politics today.

Towards the end of the movie, its director, Al-Maliki, did not forget to refer to a document found in the British diplomatic archive in London, in which the Saudi government completely denied that it played any role in the assassination of Al-Hamdi. Besides, Al-Maleky indicated that the editorial team - which he runs on the island - possesses abundant information from additional archive materials and videos, and will be broadcast in the second part of the film. He also noted that the first part will be translated into English and broadcast via Al-Jazeera English.