Five hundred police officers raided the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light headquarters in Crewe in April, arresting 12 people on suspicion of modern-day slavery, human trafficking, forced marriage and rape. All 12 have since been bailed pending further inquiries. The operation, known as Operation Decker, is aimed at individuals rather than the religious group as a whole.
The investigation centres on allegations made by a woman now in the Republic of Ireland, but it has also reopened scrutiny of a seven-year-old disappearance that has long haunted one family. Lisa Wiese, 30, went missing in March 2019 during a trip to Kerala, India, after sending her children a message from a budget hotel two days earlier telling them, “Mommy loves and misses them so much, so very much … they are both my best friends and my favorite people in the whole world.”
Wiese was a member of AROPL. German and Indian police opened investigations soon after she vanished and later identified a member of the group they wanted to question. Her former husband, AbdelRahman Hashem, has now called on Cheshire police to widen their inquiry to include her disappearance. “I want Cheshire police to widen their investigation to look into the disappearance of Lisa,” he said, adding: “German and Indian police both wanted to question the same member of AROPL. Surely the police in the UK can help make this happen.”
Hashem said Wiese had “a kind soul” and that “she cared deeply about helping the less fortunate.” Friends described her as “so warm and extroverted” and, in another recollection, “the most empathetic person.” He and Wiese had two children together. They split before he moved to the US in 2017.
Wiese converted to Islam in 2011, later moved to Egypt and joined the newly formed sect AROPL. By 2018, she had moved with the group to Germany and then to Sweden, where Hashem said she wanted to leave the group, go back to work and try to build a life for herself in Germany. That is the contradiction at the heart of the case now: the April police raid is not about her disappearance, yet her name has re-entered the frame because the same organisation remains under active scrutiny and one of its members has already been identified as someone investigators wanted to question.
AROPL is based in a former orphanage in Crewe, in north-west England, and says it has nothing to do with the Ahmadiyya Muslim community. Its teachings have been described as blending Islamic theology with internet conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, aliens posing as humans and magical healing powers. For Hashem, the renewed police pressure is a chance to push an unresolved case back onto the agenda after seven years. For his children, it leaves the same unanswered absence in place: a mother last heard from in India, and no explanation for why she never came home.
