Nordic correspondent The prime minister’s office said in a statement: “Following the Prime Minister’s recommendation, which has been accepted by His Majesty the King, it has been decided by open letter that, in order to give the voters of Folketinget the opportunity to take a position on important political issues, new elections to Folketinget will be held on Tuesday, March 24, 2026.”
Police in Canada warned a prominent Sikh activist of “credible threat” to his family’s life, days before the prime minister, Mark Carney, visits India in search of new trade deals. Moninder Singh, who heads the Sikh Federation of Canada, said officers visited his home on Sunday, to warn him that a confidential police informant had passed information suggesting he and his family were at risk. In 2023, the former prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of orchestrating the high-profile assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, another Sikh activist and Canadian citizen. Canada’s federal police and spy agency. later repeated the accusations. Singh, a close friend of Nijjar, said he believed the Indian government was behind the most recent threat. In a recording of the police warning, shared with the Guardian, an officer tells Singh “it kills me to know you’re in this position” and appears to agree with the activist’s assessment that the threat stemmed from his vocal criticism of India. “I want everyone to know how a father or a husband would feel in a situation like this. But as an activist, as a leader in the community, I’m not going to be thwarted by this. I’m not going to be silent over this. Silence is what they want,” Singh said. Singh has been threatened before but said this was the first time his wife and two children had been threatened too. “If people like me start going silent, then, you know, these people that are being extorted, or other members of our community that are actually in line to be assassinated or have violence inflicted on them, then what would happen to them?” India’s high commission did not respond to a request for comment. But on Wednesday, a senior Canadian official told reporters the government was “confident” that India’s campaign of threats and violence had ended, adding that if they had not, Carney and a high-level delegation “wouldn’t be taking this trip.” Like Nijjar, Singh is an outspoken advocate for the campaign for an autonomous Sikh homeland in India, known as Khalistan. The Khalistan movement is banned in India and activists have long been subject to threats. Singh said the campaign of intimidation had escalated in recent months. He spoke of the latest death threat as Carney and a delegation of top officials prepared to visit India for high-level trade talks. Trudeau’s accusation prompted a diplomatic crisis with India, involving tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats. But Carney, who is fighting a separate geopolitical feud with the US, has attempted to mend fences, telling Canadians his government must seek out new markets. For activists such as Singh, the visit ‘“feels like a slap in the face”. “How do you separate the violence in this country that’s being inflicted by India – that our own intelligence and law enforcement agencies are telling us is happening – and then reward them with new access to the Canadian market?” Carney has also attempted to improve relations with China, which detained two Canadians for years after the arrest in Vancouver of the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. In a visit last month, the prime minister signed a number of agreements, including plans to end tariffs on canola and to slowly bring Chinese electric vehicles to Canada. Singh expressed concern that the apparent success of the China trade missions could be replicated in Delhi. “The difference between India and China, however, is that India has been singled out as being highly violent in Canada over the last several years. It is the one country known to have carried out an assassination on Canadian soil. Other countries and their governments harass or try to silence dissidents – but the actual violence, extortions and murder come from India.” In June, Canada’s spy agency said Nijjar’s murder signaled a “significant escalation in India’s repression efforts”, reflecting a broader, transnational campaign by Delhi to threaten dissidents. “Indian officials, including their Canada-based proxy agents, engage in a range of activities that seek to influence Canadian communities and politicians. When these activities are deceptive, clandestine or threatening, they are deemed to be foreign interference,” the report said. “These activities attempt to steer Canada’s positions into alignment with India’s interests on key issues, particularly with respect to how the Indian government perceives Canada-based supporters of an independent homeland that they call Khalistan.” Federal police say they have uncovered “well over a dozen credible and imminent threats to life”, prompting them to issue “duty to warn” notices. Investigators also say a suspect linked to the Indian government was surveilling the former New Democratic party leader Jagmeet Singh as part of its network of coercion and intimidation. The suspect, who is thought to have ties to the Indian government as well as the Lawrence Bishnoi gang implicated in Nijjar’s death, knew Singh’s daily routines, travel plans and family. When the RCMP realised there was a credible threat to this life, they placed the federal party leader under police protection. Singh said he worried that Carney’s high-profile visit to India would allow Delhi to “completely wash their hands” of any accusations of wrongdoing. “Putting trade before Canadian lives is what we’ve been worried will keep happening for well over a year,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that it’s just going to continue.”
Here are some images from the newswires from Geneva this morning, showing the US and Iranian delegations arriving at the talks and the large police presence in the area.
A deadly exchange of fire between two boats off the coast of Cuba, killing four and wounding six, has raised already high tensions between Washington and Havana. Cuba’s government said a US-registered boat was carrying 10 people, most of whom it claimed “have a known history of criminal and violent activity”. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said the US was gathering its own information but called the open sea shootout “highly unusual”. Here’s what we know so far. What happened in the Cuba speedboat shootings? Cuba said its coastguard shot dead four people and injured six others travelling in a US-registered speedboat just after 2pm ET on Wednesday, in an exchange of fire one nautical mile from Cayo Falcones island, off Cuba’s northern coast. Havana’s interior ministry said the coastguard approached the boat to identify the passengers. Then “shots were fired from the boat”, injuring the captain of the Cuban vessel. The injured were evacuated and received medical assistance, Cuba said. The US said it was conducting its own investigations to try to establish what happened. Who was killed, wounded or detained? The interior ministry claimed the 10 boat passengers were armed Cubans living in the US who were trying to infiltrate the island and unleash terrorism. Amijail Sánchez González, Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez, Conrado Galindo Sariol, José Manuel Rodríguez Castello, Cristian Ernesto Acosta Guevara and Roberto Azcorra Consuegra were detained. In addition, Cuba said González and Gómez were previously wanted in Cuba on suspicion of planning terrorist acts. Cuba said it also detained another Cuban man in Cuban territory, Duniel Hernández Santos, who it claimed had come from the US to the island in order to receive the infiltrators. Michel Ortega Casanova was killed in the firefight, Cuba said. The other three dead are yet to be identified. What does the Cuban government say about the incident? The initial statement from Cuba’s interior ministry provided few details. But it did claim the boat had the Florida registration number FL7726SH. The ministry said Cuba’s government was “safeguarding its sovereignty and ensuring stability in the region”. In a second statement on Wednesday, Cuba said it had obtained more details about the passengers from the detained suspects. It claimed the group came from the US armed with assault rifles, handguns, homemade explosives, ballistic vests and telescopic sights. “According to preliminary statements from the detainees, they intended to carry out an infiltration for terrorist purposes,” the statement said. What does the US say about the incident? The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said Washington was seeking its own facts about the shooting but that it was not a US government operation. “We’re not going to base our conclusions on what they’ve [Cuba] told us, and I’m very, very confident that we will know the full story of what happened here,” Rubio told reporters while on a trip to the Caribbean nation of St Kitts and Nevis. “As we gather more information, then we’ll be prepared to respond accordingly,” he said. “Suffice it to say, it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that.” Rubio said homeland security and the US Coast Guard were investigating. James Uthmeier, Florida’s attorney general, said local authorities would investigate and assist federal agencies. “The Cuban government cannot be trusted, and we will do everything in our power to hold these communists accountable,” he posted on X. Why are US-Cuba tensions especially high right now? The Cuban economy has been pushed to brink by a US oil blockade that has been in place for more than a month. Before US forces seized Nicolás Maduro on 3 January, Cuba had relied on Venezuela for about half its fuel needs. Caribbean leaders have worried that starving 9.6 million Cubans of oil could cause the economy to collapse. In the hours before Wednesday’s boat shooting, Washington had agreed to ease oil restrictions on Cuba and allow shipments of Venezuelan oil for “commercial and humanitarian use”. The US treasury department said exports would need to go through private businesses and not the government or military apparatus in the communist state.
Good morning. British politics is locked in a race to the bottom on immigration. For years, many people have felt that the political language around migrants and asylum seekers has grown harsher. Now, a groundbreaking Guardian investigation provides evidence of a hard-right shift. The findings show that Labour and Conservative MPs are speaking about immigration in more hostile terms than at almost any point in the past century. The unprecedented analysis of 100 years of parliamentary speeches reveals a dramatic rightward turn, with the steepest swing from positive to negative rhetoric occurring in just the past five years. Researchers say politicians from the two main parties appear increasingly locked in competition over who can sound toughest on immigration, particularly after the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. So what exactly did the investigation find, and how was it carried out? For today’s newsletter, I speak to Carmen Aguilar García, the Guardian’s data projects editor. That’s after the headlines. Five big stories UK politics | Polls open in the Gorton and Denton byelection a day after Reform’s candidate found out he will not face a sanction for leaflets that omitted the party’s imprint. Health | Hospitals that cause harm and injury to women and babies during childbirth often resort to a “cover-up” of their mistakes, falsify medical records and deny bereaved parents answers, a damning report has found. UK politics | The Metropolitan police has apologised to the Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, for accidentally revealing he was the source of a tipoff that Peter Mandelson supposedly planned to flee the UK, prompting officers to arrest the former ambassador. US politics | The US has been accused of “shameless exploitation” over a health financing agreement with Zambia worth more than $1bn (£740m). Facial recognition | Police arrested a man for a burglary in a city he had never visited after face scanning software deployed across the UK confused him with another person of south Asian heritage. In depth: ‘The language increasingly frames migrants as criminals’ In the UK, the past two decades have been an unusually volatile period for political attitudes toward immigration. The Guardian’s analysis shows that positive sentiment in parliamentary debates reached an all-time high in 2018 – possibly marking a moment of quiet following Brexit, as well as national support for the victims of the Windrush scandal – before falling sharply. Our data projects and data science teams, first began thinking about the project to measure this in 2023. The investigation required careful planning to measure political language both comprehensively and accurately. Carmen Aguilar García went on maternity leave during its development and returned in 2025. In that relatively short time, she was struck by how dramatically the political rhetoric around immigration had hardened. “When I returned and reconnected with the project, Keir Starmer delivered the “island of strangers” speech. That felt like a shock to me,” she says. As the project focused on speeches in the House of Commons, Starmer’s island of stranger’s speech wasn’t analysed in the investigation – but Carmen noticed the shift. “I remember thinking that something has changed here,” she says. She adds that the shift was not limited to Starmer. Other senior Labour figures, including the now home secretary Shabana Mahmood, were speaking about limiting Article 8 human rights applications so more migrants could be deported. “The tone and rhetoric has shifted,” Carmen tells me. “There was a period when politicians talked about Britain’s proud tradition of welcoming refugees. Now the language increasingly frames migrants as criminals.” For the Guardian’s data projects team, perception alone is not enough. “One thing is having a perception that language is changing,” she says. “Another thing is asking: can we actually find evidence for this?”. *** The ebb and flow of history The project found that the way Conservative and Labour MPs are now speaking about immigration has hit one of the lowest levels in the past hundred years. “What was also very interesting was the swing,” Carmen says. “We reached an all-time high in positive rhetoric around 2018, and now we are at one of the most negative moments again. So in just six or seven years, the tone moved dramatically.” That may, in large part, be down to the boom in immigration under Boris Johnson’s premiership, where net migration peaked in 2023 with 944,000 people. Though net migration has fallen sharply, voters still incorrectly believe it is on the rise. While progressive parties such as the Green party and the Liberal Democrats continue to push a more positive narrative, the findings suggest they have had far less influence on the overall political tone than Reform UK. Despite existing for only five years, the party’s strong polling performance appears to have exerted an outsized effect on mainstream political rhetoric. “Even though Reform had only five MPs in the period of analysis we studied, their influence on political language is quite significant. Labour and the Conservatives appear to be reacting to that pressure,” Carmen explains. The investigation also examined key historical moments, including both world wars and periods of racial unrest such as the Brixton riots, to assess how major events shaped parliamentary rhetoric on immigration. One period Carmen found particularly striking were the interwar years. During the 1920s and 1930s, Britain actively encouraged citizens to move across the Empire while simultaneously restricting immigration into Britain itself, a contradiction perhaps best captured by the anti-racist slogan: “we are here because you were there”. “The 1950s was also revelatory to me,” she adds. “At the beginning of that decade there was a welcoming attitude toward Irish migrants, the Windrush generation, and south Asian migrants, largely because Britain needed workers to rebuild after the second world war. “But toward the end of the decade you see a shift toward negativity following the Notting Hill and Nottingham riots.” The data then shows a significant divergence between Conservative and Labour rhetoric in the late 1970s and 1980s. While Conservative language became increasingly negative, Labour moved in a more positive direction on immigration. But that didn’t last. *** Labour’s downward trajectory For Labour, that changed in two specific moments: in 2006 and 2025. During the 00s, under Tony Blair’s premiership, we saw Labour’s rhetoric against immigration harden, possibly in response to rising refugee arrivals, as well as the expansion of the EU. “The second moment happens after 2020,” Carmen says, a few years after Keir Starmer became Labour leader. Although Starmer initially ran on a progressive platform, many of those commitments were gradually scaled back while Labour was in opposition and later in government. Supporters welcomed the abolition of the Rwanda scheme, but many Labour voters became uneasy at the hardening tone emerging from the party’s frontbench, as well as its reluctance to directly challenge the increasingly hostile rhetoric promoted by Reform UK. Starmer appeared to shift course again last September, softening aspects of Labour’s messaging on immigration. The upcoming local elections may offer the first indication of whether that recalibration has had any political effect. But the subsequent rollout of Shabana Mahmood’s tougher, “Denmark-style” immigration proposals illustrates how fluid and contested Labour’s positioning on immigration still is. *** The methodology The findings are striking. But just as compelling is how the investigation itself was carried out. Carmen tells me the Guardian’s data projects team worked closely with its data science team, and members of University College London, to build a machine learning model capable of analysing a century’s worth of parliamentary speech, looking specifically at immigration references, an extraordinary undertaking that took nearly two years. “We realised you can’t simply take an existing sentiment model and apply it to parliamentary debates about immigration,” she says. “So we built a completely bespoke model designed specifically to measure sentiment toward immigration in parliament.” To build the model, the team first gathered all debates from the House of Commons and broke down debates into fragments of roughly five-sentences each that could be analysed individually. Then, there was an extensive process of annotations of the fragments that were considered to be about immigration. This process involved using a Large Language Model and a team of 12 people manually classifying the fragments as positive, negative or neutral. This expanded dataset was used to train the supervised machine learning model. The model was trained to understand things such as when MPs were quoting views that they then went on to disagree with, or using sarcasm. “After that, the model classified the remaining material automatically, and our calculations were based on those classifications.” The result, she says, was an “extraordinary piece of work” – a tool built specifically to measure something many think cannot be measured: rhetoric. “One striking thing was reading fragments from 20, 30, even 40 years ago that sounded completely contemporary,” Carmen says. “If you removed the date, you could easily believe they were spoken last year.” What else we’ve been reading My colleague Jason Okundaye was at the Baftas ceremony, and writes thoughtfully and eloquently on why he thinks anger for the controversy lies squarely with the BBC. Martin I’m excited about Jonas Patrick Marvin’s debut book The Breaking of the English Working Class. A timely, incisive examination of the systemic abandonment of working-class communities. Aamna We can all dwell on remembering uncomfortable moments in our lives, but Emily Retter looks at rejection sensitive dysphoria, where people find the experience overwhelming and crippling. Martin If you read any dispatch from the closely watched race in Gorton and Denton, make sure it’s my colleague’s Chris Osuh’s incredibly moving reporting on what’s at stake and how the community is fighting back. Aamna Luke Winkie writes for Slate about the ‘true crime’ live streamers who have flocked to the scene of Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance. Martin Sport Football | Vinícius Júnior ran to the corner and danced again, just as he had done in Lisbon a week ago, but this time all around him there was celebration. There was also relief. With 10 minutes left on a nervous night at the Santiago Bernabéu, he had been set free to put the ball past Anatoliy Trubin and Real Madrid into the last 16 of the Champions League. Football | Former official at Altach in Austria given suspended prison term and ordered to pay female footballers €625 each after secretly filming them in their dressing room. Ice Hockey | Hilary Knight, the captain of the US women’s ice hockey team, has responded to comments made by Donald Trump after the Americans won gold at the Winter Olympics, calling the president’s quip a “distasteful joke”. The front pages “Damning report exposes scandal of NHS maternity unit ‘cover-ups’”, is the splash on the Guardian on Thursday. “Doubling cash for NHS ‘had no impact’” is the main story over at the Telegraph. “Epstein ‘used UK as hub to traffic scores of women’”, says the Times. “Reeves: Andrew must pay back any misused taxpayer money,” has the i. “Is Prince of Darkness up to his old spin tricks,” is the lead story at the Mail. “Don’t let hate win,” warns the Mirror. “Just say non! Don’t reward French for boat failure,” is the splash at the Express. “Bafta row John: Blame the BBC,” has the Sun. “Gorillas get on my Wicks,” says the Star. Finally, the Metro with: “High rollers.” Today in Focus Will Andrew bring down the monarchy? As MPs vote to release the documents relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as trade envoy, Helen Pidd speaks to Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, about the former prince’s antics in the role and whether this scandal will be the monarchy’s last Cartoon of the day | Stephen Lillie The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad When a powerful gust of wind blew a stroller into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, Lio Cundiff didn’t hesitate. The 31-year-old dived into the 2C (35F) harbour, treading water for four exhausting minutes to keep a baby girl afloat until rescuers arrived. A trans man and standup comedian, Cundiff faced financial hardship from medical bills and lost earnings after his heroism, but remains humble. “All I did was a human act,” he said. “I’m just a human who did the most human thing you could do – which is save someone who can’t save themselves.” At a time when trans communities face the rolling back of rights in Republican-controlled states, Cundiff hopes the rescue offers a broader lesson: “Just take care of one another.” Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Martin Belam’s Thursday news quiz Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply
For Andrés Sánchez Barea, in Spain, it was the fear that arose when water started to spurt from plug sockets. For Nelson Duarte, in Portugal, it was the helplessness that hit as violent winds smacked down trees and tore tiles from roofs. For Amal Essuide, in Morocco, it was the reality that dawned when a corpse was pulled onboard a boat in the flooded medina. Each moment of horror is a fragment of the destruction wrought by an atmospheric machine-gun that in recent weeks has fired storm after storm at the western Mediterranean. Scientists do not know if climate breakdown helped pull the trigger, but research suggests it loaded the chamber with bigger bullets. In Grazalema, Spain’s wettest town, a year’s-worth of rain fell in a fortnight and overloaded the karst aquifer beneath it. Water rushed into homes through floors, walls and even electricity sockets. Authorities ordered everyone to evacuate. “I felt a lot of fear,” said Sánchez Barea, a guesthouse owner whose home is one of hundreds still in an exclusion zone. “At first we tried to get rid of the water. Lots of people came to help, but we realised it was impossible.” In Leiria, one of four regions in Portugal where extreme rain broke records in January, powerful winds added to the damage. Monte Real airbase logged a top wind speed of 109mph (176km/h) before the station was hit and measurements stopped. Storm Kristin took out electricity, internet, and telephone service in the early hours of a morning that would soon turn deadly. “It was around this time that everything seemed to be falling apart,” said Duarte, a beekeeper in Monte Real who lost half his hives. The house-rattling wind trapped him and his family indoors, where they could do nothing but avoid balconies and windows as they waited it out. “The wind became deafening and relentless, mixed with the sound of collapsing structures, flying tiles, breaking trees and violently banging metal sheets,” Duarte said. “The atmosphere was terrifying and conveyed the feeling the house might not hold up.” Duarte’s house held, but others’ did not. Ricardo Teodósio, an industrial painter in neighbouring Carvide, was fixing a garage roof with his father when it collapsed on them. Injured, the older man walked two miles to a fire station to get help for his son, who was trapped under the rubble. He was dead by the time they arrived. João Lavos, the commander of the volunteer firefighters of Vieira de Leiria, said Teodósio was one of two people to die in the Carvide-Leiria region that day. In the space of 24 hours, the firefighters were deployed to 50 storm-related events, 15 of which involved victims of accidents. “It was an unprecedented situation that caused immense damage.” Western Europe has been battered by 16 rapid-fire storms this season due to a shift in atmospheric currents that some scientists suggest will become more common as the planet heats up. While the role that the climate crisis played in the formation of the storms is still uncertain, early analysis from Climate Central found it made a marine heatwave that supercharged the storms in early February 10 times more likely. On Thursday, a study by World Weather Attribution (WWA), which uses established methods but has not yet been sent for peer review, found carbon pollution made the rains stronger and the floods worse. In Safi, the ceramics capital of Morocco, explosive mud waves shattered fragile pottery stores when rain swamped the souk at the end of last year. Most of the 43 people killed in storms across the country since mid-December died in the narrow, winding streets of its medina as water surged through. “At first, we didn’t think there would be big damages,” said Essuide, who watched the chaos play out from the roof of the hotel she runs in the old town, and who was picked up by a rescue team. “But after we entered the small boat, and they found someone dead, then we realised it was a very hard thing. It was scary.” Observational data show the most extreme rainfall days in Spain, Portugal and Morocco unleash one-third more water than they did in the 1950s, according to the WWA study, though climate models paint a more mixed picture. The researchers attributed an 11% increase in rain in the northern study region to global heating, but the effect on the southern study region was too uncertain to quantify using probabilistic methods. Clair Barnes, a scientist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study, said: “Trends in the region are mixed and are not represented by the climate models. However, other lines of evidence do suggest that climate change has increased the amount of water available in that weather system to fall as rain.” Last week, the EU’s official science advisers said Europe was failing to adapt to a hotter planet and the more extreme weather it brings. In Portugal, Duarte said emergency warnings failed to generate the necessary level of public alarm. “Nobody was prepared for such a devastating force,” he said, adding that the death toll could have easily reached hundreds if the storm had struck during the day, rather than at night. “It caught us all completely by surprise.” In Spain, meanwhile, people in Grazalema praised authorities for a timely evacuation. The centre-left leadership of the town came to a swift agreement with the centre-right authorities in Ronda, the town next door, which opened its doors to neighbours seeking shelter. “They did the right thing,” said Mario Sánchez Coronel, who runs a textile shop in Grazalema that flooded. “They acted under pressure, and it’s not easy to act like that.” In what Sánchez Coronel described as a “miracle”, his wool blanket factory suffered only minor flooding. He said he hoped to never see such rains again. “It was hard, because you think about what might happen next,” he said. “After the ‘bad’, will the ‘worst’ come?”
On 27 August 2013, a tall, spirited nine-year-old girl with long, well-brushed hair boarded an overnight coach in Barcelona. Nada Itrab was bright and observant. At school, she regularly came top of her class. Even now, she carried a notebook, eager to record the things she would discover on this trip. She had been given a camera, too – a cheap, lilac-coloured digital model which, since she was unused to luxuries, seemed to her like a treasure. In eight hours, Nada would be at Barajas airport in the Spanish capital, Madrid. She would take her first flight, heading for Bolivia’s largest city, Santa Cruz de la Sierra. To her, the trip was an adventure, like something from the storybooks that she read at her local library in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a city just south of Barcelona. The daughter of undocumented immigrants from Morocco, Nada had lived there since she was four. Only one other person was travelling with Nada. Grover Morales was a neighbour with a saintly air. In La Florida, the poor neighbourhood in which he and Nada’s family lived, Morales made a point of greeting everyone, regardless of race or faith. He read religious books, not just the Christian Bible, but also the Torah and the Qur’an. He made Nada’s family food. He had installed a bath for them with his own hands. For Morales, a Bolivian man in his mid-30s, this was a business and family trip. He was going home to pick up jewellery and bring it back to sell, or so he said. He offered to take Nada as a reward for her excellent schoolwork. They would be back in a week. Her parents signed a notarised document permitting Nada to travel with him. Nada was excited. When she returned for the new school year a few weeks later, she would not have to pretend, as she usually did, that her family had spent the summer at the seaside rather than eking out their little money at home. She would have a real story to tell. But she was also nervous. She knew things about Morales that others did not. At the cybercafe where her family used the internet, she had found a video of him entering a trance in his place of worship, with his hair whipping across his face as he worked himself up to an ecstatic frenzy. That scared her. As a nine-year-old, she also did not understand the weird, unsettling things he occasionally did when her parents left them alone. Why did he end some rough-and-tumble games by lying, fully clothed on top of her? But this trip was approved by her parents. Surely, nothing bad would happen. The security camera pictures from Barajas airport capture the moment that Nada and the white-shirted Morales line up to board the plane. The image of this bright child waiting in her spotty dress at the airport is heartbreaking. The best that can be said about what followed is that she survived. That alone is a triumph – a tribute to Nada, along with a small number of others who came to her rescue. Nada is now 21 – a serious, hard-working law student at Barcelona University. As she grew up, she found very few people were interested in asking her what happened after she stepped into that aircraft. It is only in recent years that she herself has begun to find out the full details of a nine-month-long ordeal that she tried very hard to forget. It is a process she has chosen to undertake publicly. In some ways, the hours we have spent talking over the past few months form part of her process of recovery, but they also reflect Nada’s own ambition to confront the stigma and campaign against the global trafficking of children. “I don’t want to just be the girl who got kidnapped,” she told me. * * * Staring into the camera at the immigration desk at the airport in Santa Cruz, Nada flashed a tired smile, her hair ragged from the trip. On the airport bus into the city, she stared out of the window. In Spain, Nada and her parents lived in a neighbourhood that was a byword for poverty, crime, drugs and despair. But, to Nada, Santa Cruz seemed even grubbier, shabbier, noisier. Children her age sold wares on the roadside. As they waited for a second bus to Morales’ home town of Cochabamba, they argued about her passport. Morales had kept hold of it. Now he claimed it was lost, and blamed her. They would have to stay longer while he got her a new one, he said. It was then that Nada realised she had been tricked. She wept loudly and banged at the bus window, crying for her mother. Morales had claimed to be wealthy, but his mother’s home outside Cochabamba was a dump. They spoke Quechua, an Indigenous language that Nada didn’t understand. Morales and Nada moved into a ramshackle two-storey brick building on a dirt road in Cochabamba that belonged to his absent brother Fidel. A woman called Cristina and her two daughters rented the downstairs. Morales rang Nada’s parents twice briefly. On one call Nada was able to tell her panicked mother that her passport had gone. On the other she blurted out an urgent request. Could she please tell her teacher that she had chickenpox? That way, the school would not strike her off its books. One night she dreamed that Morales was on top of her and, when she awoke, she found his hands on her thighs. Nada screamed and rushed to the window, hoping that someone might hear her cries for help. Nada was tall for her age, about the same height as Morales, but he was stronger and dragged her back. Today she recalls it as “the worst night of my life”. Over the next few weeks, during the day Nada would skip rope with Cristina’s daughters and borrow their Barbie. At night the abuse continued. Morales never let Nada out of his sight, so when his phone rang a week or two later, she overheard the voice of a Bolivian policeman, demanding that he turn himself in and hand her over to the authorities. Unbeknownst to her, Nada’s parents had reported her missing, sparking a police hunt on two continents. Yet this call made her life worse. Morales took out his sim card and smashed the phone. Even a nine-year-old child could see what was happening. He was now a fugitive from justice, and Nada was his captive. The morning after, Morales ordered Nada to grab a few of her things and shortly after, they boarded a long-distance bus. Morales behaved as if they were Bonnie and Clyde, two fugitives who were joyfully on the run together. He also gave her a new name. She was now Evelyn and would pose as his niece. He made her cover her head with headscarves and wear long dresses. Nada told me such stories as if from a distance, like a bemused spectator. “I use the logical part of my mind to repress the emotional side,” she said. “I can tell all this so coolly because I don’t feel it.” During our conversations, her tone shifted only once, when describing how she had suddenly realised, on the day Morales changed her name, that she was powerless, no longer herself. She cried a few tears, but rapidly pulled herself together, apologising. * * * After more than six hours driving north-east, the bus dropped Nada and Morales near a town called Entre Ríos. From there, they hitchhiked to a rural settlement known as Villa Unión. Morales used his knack for starting conversations with strangers, then drawing them into his confidence. Within two days, he persuaded a farmer, Santos Rodríguez, to employ them and they moved into his house, with his wife and two daughters. The next morning Nada was given a machete. She should have been starting back at school in L’Hospitalet. Instead, she began working from dawn to dusk, clearing fields, weeding pineapple crops and hacking at the encroaching forest. She washed their clothes in a creek. When Morales thought she wasn’t working hard enough, he beat her with a belt. Morales told Nada they were earning money to pay for her passport. She had always applied herself to schoolwork and now she did the same to farm labouring. “I thought that was my only way out,” she told me. Nada learned to fish in the creek, make fire by rubbing sticks together and deal with snakes. If the snakes were small, the trick was to step on their head, grab their tail and hurl them away. If they were big, she called Morales or the other farm workers, who hacked at them with machetes. Apart from strength and experience, the men had an additional advantage: boots. Morales had only bought her rubber sandals. On Saturdays, Morales would take her to a place of worship that belonged to a controversial messianic Andean religion called Aeminpu, the Evangelical Association of the Israelite Mission of the New Universal Covenant. Founded by a former Peruvian shoemaker, this fiercely conservative religion preaches a mishmash of beliefs, fixates on the Ten Commandments and sees signs of the apocalypse everywhere. One Saturday, Morales groomed himself carefully. Nada remembers watching a ceremony in which he stood on the stage and a man in a white tunic wafted incense. Words were intoned in Quechua. Men hugged him. Morales looked happy. Nada asked what had happened. “Now you are my wife,” he said. He became mean, jealous and more violent. At night, he raped her. One evening, as she washed in the river, he pushed her head under water and held it there. He repeated the action three times. Another day, she dared question his belief in God. Enraged, he struck her right foot with a machete, opening a hole down to her sole. They doused the wound in gasoline. She still has the scar. In the evenings, Morales made her repeat out loud the Ten Commandments. In the mornings, she had to tell him her dreams, which he would interpret. In her spare time, Nada drew birds, plants and flowers in her notebook. She labelled them in three languages – Spanish, Catalan and English. It was like schoolwork, which made her feel better. She clung on to her optimism. This would all be over one day, and she could go back to her family, and to school. * * * In late December 2013, four months into her ordeal, Nada and Morales returned to his brother Fidel’s house in Cochabamba. As Nada listened to drunken neighbours celebrate New Year and calendars flipped to 2014, Lt José Miguel Hidalgo of Spain’s Civil Guard police was anxiously awaiting permission to fly to Bolivia. At 45, Hidalgo was a lead detective in the homicide, extortion and kidnapping squad at the elite investigative Central Operative Unit (UCO) in Madrid. Nada’s case had landed on Hidalgo’s desk after her parents went to the Catalan police in the early hours of 5 September and tearfully tried to explain what had happened. In Spain, international investigations must go through a national police force such as the Civil Guard, so the two forces worked together. The Catalans tracked down Morales’s brother Fidel – owner of the Cochabamba house – who also now lived in the Barcelona area. Wiretaps were placed on Nada’s parents’ phones, and on those of his brother. Nada’s parents said they had trusted Morales. They believed that he wanted to dress her in jewels to smuggle back into Spain, but seemed confused. Even today, Nada is not sure whether Morales fooled them, or if they effectively sold her. Maybe both things are possible. They were undocumented immigrants living in the shadows of Spanish society. Her father – who drank, raged and bullied his wife – worked odd jobs for cash. Her mother cleaned houses. They squatted in a repossessed flat, with no running water and electricity stolen from the grid. Water was fetched from a public tap in the cemetery across the road. Nada used to push a shopping trolley there with her mother, to fill plastic bottles. As he investigated the case, Hidalgo’s concern for Nada grew. He discovered that Morales had fled to Spain in 2005 using false documents to avoid trial in Bolivia for raping two half-sisters, aged 11 and 14. Worse still, it took four months for Hidalgo and a colleague to receive permission to travel – slowed by bureaucracy and fraught relations between a rightwing Spanish government and Bolivia’s leftwing president, Evo Morales. On 28 January, Hidalgo and a colleague finally reached Bolivia and two days later, police raided Fidel’s house in Cochabamba. When they arrived, they were greeted by Cristina, who informed them that Morales and Nada had left the previous day. “It was like in the movies,” said Hidalgo, when we met recently at the Civil Guard headquarters in Madrid. “You get so close, and then they disappear.” In Cochabamba, Nada had watched Morales buying more farm tools and realised they were about to move again. He also bought her a guitar and a music book to learn Aeminpu songs. She was scared of him, so studied diligently. Within a week, she could strum and sing – but Nada hated that guitar. When they departed, on the morning of 29 January 2014, he made her carry it. More precious things, like some earrings her mother gave her, were left behind. As Hidalgo was making his way to Fidel’s house in Cochabamba, Morales and Nada were starting a journey deep into the rainforest by bus, taxi and on foot. Inside the forest, the trees grew so tall and dense that it was dark even during the day. Snakes, monkeys, giant ants and jaguars lurked. It took almost an hour to wade through chest-high water across one river. They eventually met a tall man dressed in black, wearing high boots. Nada noticed that Morales was deferential to him, and treated her well in his presence. The man led them to their final destination, a coca-cultivating village high in the steep, verdant Carrasco national park. Nada was amazed to find herself in what she saw as a dazzlingly beautiful prison. They were in a place where the land rose towards the Andes and clouds clung to the thick forest. Wooden houses were dotted around a green pasture with a crystal-clear stream. Horses grazed and trees were laden with fruit. The men here carried guns. The green coca plants stretched out in neat long rows. Apart from that, the village felt remote in both distance and time. “Like something from the 12th century,” Nada recalled. Now she worked full-time in the plantations, picking coca leaves on day wages. It was her job to collect their pay from the farmers they worked for, and she secretly stashed away small sums of money, with the idea of buying herself a ticket home. Aircraft and helicopters occasionally flew overhead. Often, these were transport for the cocaine trade. Police were afraid to come here, and rarely did so. There was no escape. * * * On 13 February 2014, Hidalgo and his colleague flew back to Spain frustrated. They had missed Nada by 24 hours and now she had disappeared again. “The sad truth is that she had already been in the hands of an abuser for six months,” he recalled. The leads his Bolivian colleagues received over the next few weeks produced no results. Meanwhile, back in La Florida, few people beyond Nada’s family knew she had been kidnapped. Her story had been kept out of the media. Three weeks later, on 2 March, Cristina received a call from Morales. Police were tapping her phone, and listened in. The conversation was mostly in Quechua but, suddenly, they heard a girl start speaking Spanish. It was Nada, asking about the maize she had planted in Cristina’s garden. She sounded upset when Cristina said that they had already eaten it. The call at least proved Nada was alive. Cristina’s phone showed that Morales had rung from a solar-powered public telephone deep in the Yungas de Totora region, an 18-hour hike from the nearest road. A police unit set out on 4 March, prepared to camp overnight and cross three large rivers, but a wooden bridge over the last river had been swept away. As they trudged back the next day, Nada turned 10 years old. Hidalgo returned to Bolivia, arriving in Cochabamba on 7 March. Bolivian colleagues warned that the only way to reach her was by helicopter, but local narcos would shoot at any aircraft passing over their fields. They would have to do a deal. Over lunch at a restaurant in Cochabamba, Hidalgo sat down to negotiate with local leader Angel León, who held sway over the coca growers (some of whom grow legally, while others produce for the cocaine trade). “He took it as a matter of honour,” Hidalgo said, who also bought the farmers 500 kilos of sugar as part of the deal. León agreed to instruct his men to capture Morales and hold on to Nada. Police could then fly in, load them up, and immediately fly away. That night, Nada and Morales were in their cabin when they heard men wading across the river. Soon a posse of rifle-carrying farmers appeared at their door, looking menacing in the gloom. Nada hid in a corner, sick with panic. Morales looked even more scared. The men tied Morales’s hands together, locked him in a wooden crate and told Nada to follow them. First, she grabbed her camera, notebook and money. A farmer took her into his family cabin, cradling his gun as he watched over her. She remained terrified. The following morning, an army unit provided two helicopters to take Hidalgo and a Bolivian police squad to rescue Nada. They took off at 11am, flying above the thick forest canopy. Twenty-five minutes later Hidalgo made out a clearing with a few houses. A Bolivian police officer pointed to a girl standing in the field with a bright blue headscarf. Hidalgo knew that for the operation to work, it had to be fast. “In and out, without cutting the engines,” the pilots at the Chimore airbase had told him. On the ground, Nada did not understand what was happening. The village was in a state of tension, the men at their cabin doors. The noise of the first helicopter grew louder and louder, until it landed in the field and a policewoman in a blue uniform ran towards her. “Are you Nada?” Nobody had called her by that name for months. She barely had time to reply when another helicopter landed. A tall man with jumped out and asked the same question. It was Hidalgo. Hidalgo noticed that her voice had a marked Bolivian lilt and her skin was blistered with mosquito bites. She began to cry. When they took off a few minutes later, Nada looked down, transfixed by the sight of the lush rainforest from above. * * * The next 10 days went by in a flurry of activity. Nada was flown to Cochabamba, where she was given a bed at a state children’s home. There were new clothes, medical checks, interviews with police and prosecutors, outings to see the sights. Nada shared the dormitory with a group of teenage girls who brushed and styled her long, dark hair daily. No attempt was made to put Nada in contact with her parents, who were now being investigated by public prosecutors for allegedly risking their daughter’s life in return for a promised share of Morales’ jewellery. Hidalgo consulted his wife, then bought Nada a colourful Monster High rucksack. She was delighted. He was impressed by the girl’s resilience and intelligence. One of her main concerns was whether she would have to repeat the school year. “She was very bright, lively and grasped things really quickly,” he told me. She also translated basic Quechua words for him. To her, Hidalgo seemed like the sort of father she had only seen in movies – protective and caring. During the flight back to Spain, Hidalgo noticed that she slipped his uneaten bread roll into her pocket. She was still in survival mode. On 17 March 2014, seven months after she left Spain, 10-year-old Nada Itrab stepped off a flight at Barcelona airport, dragging her new rucksack behind her and clasping Hidalgo’s hand. For a few brief minutes, she was allowed to see her parents, but not alone. “I’d never seen my father cry before,” she told me. Then they were led away. Nada was now a charge of the Catalan regional government, which had decided to remove her from her parents. There would be no return home or to the school friends she missed, since she would be placed in institutions away from L’Hospitalet. Her ordeal was far from over. Newspapers and television programmes ran jubilant reports of her return. They had only found out about Nada after her rescue in the jungle. Police gave a press conference, saying Nada was well but offering only vague details about what had happened. And that was it. Apart from the news, in October, that Morales had been handed a 17-year prison sentence for child-trafficking and sexual abuse and, two years later, that her parents received two-year suspended sentences for “abandoning” their child, the story seemed to be over. * * * In late 2022, Neus Sala, a seasoned Catalan broadcast journalist, made one of her regular visits to the Civil Guard police’s headquarters in Madrid. While there, she spoke to Hidalgo, whom she had known for more than three decades. After leading some of Spain’s most famous murder and kidnapping investigations, Hidalgo is now a comandante and helps manage the Civil Guard’s 700-strong UCO unit from an airy office at its Madrid headquarters, where – when I visited late last year – a photo of Nada sits on a bookshelf. In his conversation with Sala, he recalled Nada’s rescue as a career highlight. The girl was now 18, they realised. What had happened to her? Sala was determined to find out. Nada Itrab was easy to find. Local news sites had reported that a girl with that name had recently won a €500 prize for the best senior year school essay in L’Hospitalet. Curiously, the reports did not mention she was the same girl kidnapped a decade earlier. Nada, who was now studying business at a local university, also advertised online as a tutor. Sala wrote to her, saying that she knew Hidalgo well and they both wanted to find out how she was. Might they meet? Nada told me her instinctive reaction was “no”. She did not want to hash over her past, especially with a journalist. The Bolivia affair was a distant, shameful secret, something she had deliberately erased. But the mention of Hidalgo intrigued her. A month passed before she agreed to meet. By coincidence, Sala had also grown up in L’Hospitalet. In fact, they later discovered, they had both lived as children in the same apartment block, opposite the Barcelona regional metro’s Can Vidalet station. They arranged to meet at the station at midday on 27 November 2022. Sala waited in the winter sun with her small black lurcher dog, Pistón. When Nada arrived, Sala was struck by a calm and dignified stylishness: she wore a blue overcoat, was immaculately made up and had her thick black hair twisted in a braid that hung below her waist. In fact, Nada was a bundle of nerves at the thought of revisiting a deeply buried trauma. But she had learned to hide such feelings. As Nada laid out the story of her life since her return to Spain, Sala listened aghast. Catalan authorities had placed her in two different children’s homes (where, initially, Hidalgo visited from time to time) in towns outside Barcelona until she was 14 and then returned Nada to her parents’ squat – despite their declared guilt in the Bolivia fiasco. Four years later, Nada still lived there. Returning to La Florida had been a ghastly experience, though she had been desperate to leave the nuns who ran the last of the two children’s homes. She lived in fear of her father’s temper, going to bed early without eating just to avoid him. She kept a knife under her pillow. At the local Rubió i Ors high school, Nada’s teachers saw her crumbling as she struggled at home and fought to get top grades. She suffered severe anxiety attacks. Hunger, scarcity, abuse, domestic chaos and anxiety drove her deep into depression. She ran away from home aged 15, sleeping on apartment block rooftops and staircases for a week. She contemplated suicide aged 16, walking around their tiny living room with a knife in her hand for an hour or so. She conjured up a small light in her mind which enabled her to let go of the knife. “It represented hope for the future,” she said. Once more, her salvation was school. Alba Solsona, the history and geography teacher who oversaw her prize-winning essay (on Palestine – a subject they both felt passionately about) told me Nada always stood out as curious, competitive and driven. She was more serious than other adolescents and, set on getting good grades, found it hard to make friends. Teachers were told Nada came from an extremely vulnerable background but knew no other details. At home, Nada read assiduously. In class, she was a tenacious debater. “As a teacher, she forced you to be at your best,” Solsona said. As they grew closer, working on the research project, Solsona occasionally suggested there was more to life than good grades. But Nada was clear. This was her route out of La Florida. * * * After meeting at Can Vidalet metro station on 27 November 2022, Nada and Sala continued their conversation over a shared plate of patatas con alioli in the winter sunshine outside a nearby bar, Juanito’s. For Nada, the meeting was revelatory. She had barely talked about Bolivia since she first returned and had come to frame it less as a kidnapping by an abusive paedophile than as a holiday that went wrong. As she and Sala talked, the truth began to come into focus. “Tell me my story,” she begged Sala. Sala was wary of provoking fresh trauma. “I’m not a psychologist,” she told me. Nevertheless, she sketched out how Nada had been kidnapped, enslaved and then rescued. Sala, who had spent her career reporting harrowing stories from around the world, was amazed by the poise and resilience of the woman in front her. “She was a survivor,” Sala told me. She was also indignant that the Catalan government had never formalised Nada’s residency status, even though she had lived in Spain since she was four and, as a victim of people trafficking, automatically qualified for permanent residency. Instead, as an undocumented Moroccan immigrant, Nada was not permitted to work, nor could she apply for student grants. When Sala offered to help, starting by ensuring she gained legal residency, Nada was unsure how to respond. A month after their first meeting, in late December 2022, she went to Sala’s house in Barcelona, with a surprising request. She didn’t just want help, Nada explained. She had heroines, whose lives she studied and books she read. Young women like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education activist shot in the head by radical Islamists in 2012, and the Yazidi woman Nadia Murad, who had been enslaved by Isis in Iraq when she was 21. These women had used their suffering to campaign. Nada wanted to do the same. “I want my story to make abused and enslaved children visible,” she announced. Together, over the months that followed, they hatched a plan. Nada would learn to tell her story in public, and together they would work on a book and a documentary. With Sala’s help, Nada had her residency approved. Nada also switched her university course to law and international relations, to better prepare her for a life of advocacy. Yet even as she forged ahead, Nada was haunted by terrible nightmares – of violent men chasing her through forests or threatening urban landscapes. Sala found Nada a psychologist and took her to an animal therapy centre run by a friend, where Nada spent time with horses. One day, the owner asked Nada to speak with a group of executives who had arrived for a course. For the first time, she told her story to strangers. Nada was bemused to see them weep. Soon, Sala ceased to think of Nada as the protagonist in a story that she would cover as a journalist. She thought of her, as she told me, like “a second daughter”. The relationship filled an emotional need for Sala, now 56, after three decades of reporting on victims of crime and catastrophe. It has become an all-consuming, emotionally exhausting and, so far, financially draining project. “I’ve told a lot of stories of hardship and seen young girls die,” Sala told me. “If I can help just one of them make it, then it will be worth the effort.” * * * Through all this, Nada continued living with her family in La Florida, even though her father’s frightening rages and the evictions from their squatted apartments continued. Though Sala was convinced that her family were, in fact, the greatest danger to Nada’s future, Nada wanted to support her mother, and be present for her two younger brothers. There was another reason for not leaving home. Nada had discovered religion while at school. Aged 16, she had watched TikTok videos of people reciting the Qur’an, which had soothed her anxieties. Her parents were not religious, but she began reading the Qur’an and hadiths, the sayings and deeds of Muhammad, finding lessons about forgiveness, love and peace. The trick, she said, was “to answer evil with goodness”. In her mind, that meant pardoning her parents and even Morales. Strangely, her encounter with him had not put her off religion. “My first contact with God was when I asked how someone like him could claim to believe in God, and that was the day he stabbed me through the foot,” she said. Early in 2024, Sala found a women’s refuge that offered a small studio flat in a town outside Barcelona. But Nada worried that this contravened an Islamic duty to her family. One day that summer, after visiting a contemporary art museum in Barcelona, she wandered into the Santa Maria del Mar basilica, a soaring 14th-century gothic building. A Roman Catholic priest was standing near the altar, inviting people to confess. She decided to ask for his help. Perhaps he could advise her? In the confession box, once more, she discovered the power of her story. As she spoke, the priest wept in great, gulping sobs. “I’ve never seen anyone cry like that,” she said. “He was really suffering.” When the priest recovered, he advised Nada to move out. “You need to escape, and start a new life.” When police turned up at the family’s squat to evict them in November 2024, she finally accepted the offer of the studio. When Nada moved in, she felt joyful and free. It was the first time she had experienced domestic peace – and only she had the key. There was another pull on her attention. Her mother had found her a job as the receptionist in a block of self-catering apartments popular with wealthy eastern European and Russian mafia members. The men loved her; one took her shopping, and to exclusive restaurants. Sala and Nada argued about whether she should ever accept anything from them. Eventually, Nada tired of these men’s attention. “When they see you are poor, they think they have power,” she told me. If Nada had felt tempted by luxury, it wasn’t just because that was the opposite of poverty, but also because the plan with Sala seemed to be stalling. Nobody wanted their documentary – or not with the campaigning seriousness they insisted it should have. Publishers shrugged at their book proposal. “If she had been white and not Moroccan, things would have been different,” said Sala. By now, Nada was heavily invested in the project. With Sala’s encouragement, she switched to law and international relations. This fitted her new aims and was more fulfilling, but was riskier in terms of future employment. What if the plan didn’t work? With no family safety net, failure could still mean a squat in La Florida. Since Sala’s old media contacts didn’t seem interested, Nada went directly to Uri Sabat, one of Spain’s best-known YouTubers. When Sala found out, she was furious that Nada had blown the exclusivity of her personal story, fearing that it had hurt the chances of landing the documentary or publishing deal that was meant to set her up to finish her studies and give her independence. They did not speak for a month. Once they had patched up their differences, Sala steered Nada on to popular mainstream morning television talkshows. On the first of these appearances, on Antena 3 in early September 2025, Nada told her story, explaining that she forgave Morales (who had by now died in jail). “When you forgive, you don’t do it because the other person deserves it,” she explained. “I do this because my heart deserves to live free of rancour.” The studio audience applauded enthusiastically. Since they were in Madrid, Sala took Nada to see Hidalgo. The entire UCO headquarters seemed thrilled by her visit and Nada discovered that her case was legendary. Several artefacts recovered with her – a pocket Qur’an and notebook kept by Morales – had long been displayed in a glass cabinet. “It was a special case from the very start,” Hidalgo told me. “Any other child would have died. But she is a chameleon. She can adapt to anything.” Seeing her again was an emotional high. “It was the same Nada – so very bright and quick,” he said. Nada had a lump in her throat, as she tried not to cry. “I could see how much my life had meant to them,” she said. Hidalgo invited her to come back and help him train agents dealing with trafficking victims. On 14 September 2025, Barcelona’s La Vanguardia newspaper ran a story about their reunion and told of Nada’s double tragedy: first the kidnapping, then her abandonment by the Catalan authorities. The article brought their project back to life. Suddenly, publishers and television producers wanted to talk. * * * A few days later, I began travelling regularly to Barcelona from my home in Madrid to meet Nada. I was curious about her backstory, her ambition and her relationship with Sala. We spoke for hours, sitting across the small dinner table at Sala’s house – a two-storey home tucked down a private alley close to the Parque Güell with its outlandish Gaudí decorations. Conversations were often three-way affairs, with Sala present. Nada felt at home here, nipping into the kitchen to make herself hot chocolate. Their bond had been strengthened by the up-and-down nature of their project, including disagreements. Sala was straight-talking and loving, fretting about Nada’s eating or chastising her for overdressing for television appearances. “You can’t turn up looking like Angelina Jolie!” Nada shrugged. She always arrived immaculately dressed and made up. Her calm and candid eloquence hid a fidgety energy. To begin with, she toyed with anything on the table, including my tape recorder. These conversations became like watching a box being slowly opened. Nada was excavating her own past, reading police and court documents for more details about what happened to her, preparing to sue the Catalan government for €300,000 for negligence (from an intern placement at a law firm in Barcelona) and digging up memories with the help of psychologists. She was filling huge gaps in her life, while trying to understand them. She struggled, especially, to work out her parents – whom she did not want to discuss. In some ways, things were happening too quickly. During this time, she appeared on more TV shows, her polished presence and moderate tone contrasting with the horrors of her story. The American Spanish-language channel Univision broadcast a report on her. By now, she was receiving three emails a week from abused girls and young women around the world, including some from the Aeminpu cult. Nada wrote back, or had video chats with them, though she could do little more than listen and express sympathy. At the same time, she was studying for her law degree, writing her book with Sala, interning at the law firm and preparing her claim against the Catalan government. By December, she was exhausted and clumps of hair began falling out. She was determined to tough it out, but her body was betraying her. * * * On a sunny winter morning, we drove in Sala’s utilitarian grey Toyota Proace van, with her dog Pistón, to La Florida and walked around the cemetery where Nada used to fill water bottles. For Sala, whose father is buried here, this was a first – Nada always asked to stay away from her parents’ barrio when they met. Even now, Nada fretted about bumping into her father, since her parents were angry about her television appearances. (By January, when she had used the book advance to buy her family furniture, their attitude had softened. “They now realise that I will inevitably tell my story, and have changed,” she said.) We visited the rundown block where Morales had been their neighbour and wandered past the apartment with broken windows where her family now squats. As we walked, Nada declared that La Florida would be one of her causes, too. “I’m proud of this place,” she said. She recalled the delinquency, drugs and fights (one year, youths torched the Christmas tree in the main plaza), but also remembers it as a neighbourly place, full of life. As we drove away from La Florida, Nada told me her dream was to speak to the UN about the need to fight child trafficking. This determination has a cost. The last time we met, at the end of January, Nada was going through a punishing, intensive round of therapy to overcome her dissociation from what has happened to her. Some of the pain locked away more than a decade ago was now beginning to show. It was like removing a mask, she said, and very scary. “I consider myself strong,” she told me. “So, if I’m suffering, imagine what it’s like for someone who doesn’t have the things I now have.” Nada’s way of coping involves throwing herself harder into her fight. In a recent WhatsApp message, she told me that she had a letter ready for the well-known human rights barrister Amal Clooney, who has represented Nadia Murad (a Nobel peace prize winner, like Nada’s other heroine, Malala Yousafzai). “I want to ask her advice,” Nada said. She was going to send it once this article was published. Knowing Nada, it will be on its way tomorrow. • Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
A Hong Kong appellate court on Thursday overturned fraud convictions against the media mogul Jimmy Lai, a rare victory in the prominent pro-democracy activist’s legal battles. Lai, 78, an outspoken critic of China’s ruling Communist party who founded the now defunct Apple Daily, will stay in prison because weeks ago he was sentenced to 20 years after being convicted in another case brought under a China-imposed national security law. It is more than five years since he was arrested under the law, which was used in a years-long crackdown on many of Hong Kong’s leading activists. Lai’s plight has evoked grief over the loss of press freedom in the city and prompted an international outcry, though the city’s authorities insist his case had nothing to do with media independence. The conviction that was overturned on Thursday was from an earlier fraud case in which prosecutors alleged that a consultancy firm controlled by Lai had used office space that his media business rented for publication and printing purposes. Lai was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison in 2022 after being found guilty of two fraud charges. A lower court judge found that Lai and his co-defendant Wong Wai-keung had concealed that the firm was occupying space and violated lease agreement, saying he had used his media organisation as a protective shield. He also fined Lai 2m Hong Kong dollars ($257,000). But judges at the higher court ruled the prosecution had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendants had made false representations, throwing out both convictions. Neither defendant appeared in court. The ruling could slightly reduce Lai’s total prison time. The judges handling Lai’s national security case allowed the two sentences to be served concurrently for only two years, with the other 18 years to be added after the fraud sentence. The lengthy sentence has raised concerns that he could spend the rest of his life in prison. Lai’s children have expressed hope that Donald Trump, who has said he wanted to secure their father’s release, could help do so during an upcoming visit to Beijing. The White House has confirmed that Trump will travel to China on 31 March through 2 April to meet the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. The UK foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said Lai, a British citizen, was sentenced for exercising his right to freedom of expression and called on the Hong Kong authorities to release him on humanitarian grounds. Chinese and Hong Kong authorities have defended Lai’s sentencing in the national security case – the harshest penalty handed down for national security offences in Hong Kong – saying it reflected the spirit of the rule of law. They also insisted the security law is necessary for the city’s stability. Separately, a Hong Kong court on Thursday sentenced the father of a wanted pro-democracy activist to eight months in prison under the city’s national security law after he attempted to terminate her insurance policy and withdraw the funds. Kwok Yin-sang, 69, was found guilty earlier this month of “attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources” belonging to an “absconder” under the city’s national security law. He is the first person in the city to be charged and convicted with the offence. He had pleaded not guilty and did not testify at the trial. His daughter, Anna Kwok, helps lead the Washington-based advocacy group Hong Kong Democracy Council, and is one of 34 overseas activists wanted by Hong Kong national security police. In Washington, before her father’s sentence was handed down, Anna Kwok told Reuters she found it “utterly despicable” that the Hong Kong government was going after her father. He was accused of trying to withdraw funds totalling HK$88,609 from an education savings insurance policy he bought for her when she was almost two years old. The acting principal magistrate Cheng Lim-chi said since Anna Kwok was a fugitive, directly or indirectly handling her insurance policy is illegal. With Associated Press and Reuters