Extracted from The Age
This is the first article I read about this story....
Fears held for missing Syrian Gay Girl blogger
Amina Arraf was last seen being bundled into a car by armed men in Damascus. WHEN Amina Arraf began blogging from Syria's capital about life, politics and being gay in the Arab world, it was February, the Arab Spring was in its first bloom, and the prospects of an uprising in authoritarian Syria still seemed remote.
She appeared then to have only an inkling of how profound the upheaval would be.
''I live in Damascus, Syria. It's a repressive police state … But I have set up a blog with my name and my photo. Am I crazy?'' she asked in one of the first posts on her English-language blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus.
''I have to begin by doing something bold and visible,'' she wrote. ''I can because I'm a dual national and have benefits of politically connected relatives.''
Nothing has been heard of her since she was seen being bundled into a car by three armed men in central Damascus on Monday evening.
With that, Ms Arraf, 35, a Syrian American, joined the more than 10,000 people plucked from their homes or city streets since the Syrian uprising began 11 weeks ago. Her disappearance might have gone unnoticed were it not for the attention she drew after a posting in April that propelled her to world fame.
The post, titled ''My father, the hero,'' recounted how her father used stern words to dispatch two members of the security services who had come to her home to detain her.
Citing President Bashar al-Assad and his brother Maher, who is leading the brutal crackdown on the protest movement, her father said: ''They will not live forever, they will not rule forever, and you both know that. So if you want good things in the future, you will leave and you will not take Amina with you.'' The men left.
The post had more than 430,000 views and was reported around the world.
It was clear, however, that Ms Arraf was wanted. Days later, security services returned to her home, but she had been living in hiding since early May. When she was seized on Monday, she was on her way to meet another Syrian activist, raising the possibility she had been betrayed.
According to a posting on her blog by a relative on Tuesday, her family has been unable to find out which of the 18 branches of the security services is holding her. The witness to her abduction said Ms Arraf hit one of her captors before she was hauled away, a detail that would fit with the feisty, passionate and defiant personality that emerges from her blog, which eloquently captures the fusion of hope and apprehension sweeping the region.
''The Arab people are asleep no more and the Arab people, not the regimes, are making their own history now,'' she wrote on Sunday in one of her last posts. ''No conspiracy, no diabolical plot but the slow accumulation of grievances and indignities and a people who'd outgrown its rulers. We were still sleeping but barely. And a spark was all that was needed to awaken us.''
As word of her capture rippled through the online community some sceptics questioned whether someone who had grown up in the US and returned to Syria only last year could truly be said to speak for the Syrians battling to overthrow their regime. Others speculated that her American passport would protect her from the worst of the horrors endured by many other detained Syrians.
But in the posting on Sunday, barely 24 hours before she was captured, Ms Arraf made it clear that she did not consider herself immune. ''I keep my nails trimmed shorter than they have ever been lest I be captured and they try and pry them off,'' she wrote.
On Fridays, when the biggest protests take place, she would ink her name and phone number onto her arm before heading out to join the demonstrations, so if she were killed, her family would be informed, according to her blog. ''Today or tomorrow might be the last one for me,'' she wrote, ''or tomorrow might be the beginning of a new Syria.''
Then this article was published a few hours later....
Does she even exist? The mystery of the Gay Girl in Damascus
Jelena Lecic ... the Croat living in London says the Gay Girl in Damascus blog has been carrying a picture of her.
The alarming story of a Syrian-American lesbian blogger, who was reportedly kidnapped by armed gunmen in Damascus, sent the world's media into a frenzy - but now her very existence is being questioned.
Reporters have been unable to find anyone who has met Amina Arraf in person, while a woman living in Britain said photographs circulating on the internet were of her, not the blogger.
A grab from Gay Girl in Damascus
Arraf, known for frank posts about her sexuality and open criticism of President Bashar al-Assad's autocratic rule in her blog, A Gay Girl in Damascus, has also admitted to writing fictional accounts in previous blogs.
Some of that same material appears on A Gay Girl in Damascus.
However, Jelena Lecic claims Arraf stole her identity and has been using it for more than a year.
Stolen identity ... a grab from Jelena Lecic's Facebook page.
Lecic is a Croatian woman working as an administrator at the Royal College of Physicians in London,
according to her facebook page.
Her representative, Kim Grahame of public relations firm Just News International, has been circulating photos of Lecic which appear to be of the same woman as that featured in articles linked to Arraf.
"I pray that Amina is safely returned to her family but I want to make it quite clear that I am not her despite my photographs being attached to this story," Lecic said in a press release.
It calls into question reports that Arraf was detained after weeks on the run in the Syrian capital. The only source of this information was a blog post purportedly written by Arraf's cousin Rania Ismail.
Ismail said that Arraf was last seen on Monday being bundled into a car by three men in civilian clothes as she was on her way to meet someone at the activist Local Co-ordination Committees, a group that helps document the protests calling for an end to the Assad regime.
Ismail said a friend accompanying her was nearby and saw what happened.
In February, an American blogger named Paula Brooks began communicating with Arraf via email but became suspicious when her IP address was traced back to Edinburgh in Scotland.
Arraf sent Brooks a photo of herself that matches the photos Lecic claims were taken from her Facebook page.
She told Brooks that her IP traced back to Scotland because she used a proxy to hide her identity, The Washington Post reported.
However, an email Arraf sent to Brooks discussing plans to study in Britain led her to suspect Arraf might have been blogging from the University of Edinburgh all along.
Media have been scouring records for confirmation that Arraf exists and have also been trying to confirm biographical information found in her blog, but have come up empty. No one, including the US State Department, has been able to confirm her arrest.
NPR reporter Andy Carvin said he had spoken to a number of people who claimed to have met or interviewed Arraf but found that nobody had even met her in person or spoken to her on the phone. Even a purported girlfriend in Canada said she had only had a text-based relationship with Arraf.
But Carvin said he still believed Arraf was a real person and speculated that the name was a pen name to protect the woman in Syria.
"Despite all the questions I have, I am deeply worried that this discussion about her identity could distract people from the possibility that she might be being brutalised in detention, and in dire need of support from friends and strangers alike," Carvin wrote.
It has also been revealed that Arraf has admitted to publishing fictional accounts on a previous blog that has been described as a "serialised novel".
"This blog will have what may sometimes seem likely deeply personal accounts. And sometimes they will be. But there will also be fiction. And I will not tell you which is which," she wrote on that blog.
The New York Times reported that some of the same material published on the previous, partly fictional, blog also appears on Gay Girl in Damascus.
An activist with the Local Co-ordination Committees asserted on Tuesday that Arraf was taken. The activist spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing retribution from the regime.
On Wednesday, the same activist said the group had "no independent confirmation" and had reported it based on the cousin's blog entry, and from two people who claimed to be friends but who also got the information from the blog.
"As far as we know, nobody's emerged who has actually met her," the activist said.
Arraf's Canadian friend, Sandra Bagaria, who started a campaign to have Arraf released, is dismayed at suggestions she may have been deceived or that her Syrian friend might have been using a false identity.
''I don't know. I really can't tell. I would love to tell you I know," she told The Washington Post.
"I just want it to be clarified, and then I will deal with what I should and should not feel. But for now I just want it to be a little more clear."
Efforts to contact Rania Ismail, the purported cousin, were unsuccessful.
In the blog, Arraf says she was born in Virginia.
AP reporters tried to track down family and friends there. They found no public records with her name or her parents' names, nor evidence they were there.
Friends contacted Lecic after seeing the photo in The Guardian, her representative said.
"At first she didn't believe it, or that it was a mistake," Grahame said. "She realised when she looked that it was one of her photos."
Lecic asked The Guardian to remove the photo, said Julius Just, the organisation's chairman. He said Lecic was "extremely concerned" that some extremist might attack her on the assumption that she was a high-profile lesbian.
He said the newspaper pulled the photograph, only to replace it with another one - also of Lecic.
Editors at The Guardian declined to comment, referring to a correction on the website saying the images had been removed "pending investigation into the origins of the photographs and other matters relating to the blog".
Just News International founder Julius Just, said his client Lecic believed her identity was stolen about a year ago, when her Facebook photographs appeared on another person's profile. He said neither he nor Lecic knew Arraf's identity.
"Does this Amina Arraf exist? Is she a composite? Who knows what this story is?" he said.
Amina Arraf or Jelena Lecic? To be continue.....
