Dressed in her favourite pink and white tutu with a large bow in her hair, six-year-old Martine Vik Magnussen poses excitedly for the camera at one of her very first ballet lessons.
‘Like many girls, she started off wanting to be a ballerina,’ says her father Petter, gesturing towards the treasured photograph of the daughter whose life was to end so brutally at the age of 23.
‘She had this tremendous sense of humour, and she was always genuinely interested in other people. She enjoyed life – she was pure sunshine. I know that many parents would say that about their children but there’s no better way to describe her,’ he adds sadly.
Sitting in the living room of his elegant home on the island of Nesoya, a wealthy enclave 12 miles southwest of the Norwegian capital Oslo, retired academic Petter is at times close to tears as he leafs through family albums. It is the first time since Martine’s murder in London 18 years ago that he has shared them with a journalist.
Back in 2008, the death of this bright and beautiful young student made headlines in British newspapers not just because of its cruelty, but because it soon emerged that her alleged murderer, Farouk Abdulhak, had evaded justice by fleeing to Yemen, which has no extradition treaty with the UK.
Now, Odd Petter Magnussen – who goes by Petter – is speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail because of another sickening twist in the still unresolved case.
In January, when the US Department of Justice released another tranche of the Epstein files, it emerged that the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein had brokered a meeting between Farouk Abdulhak’s father Shaher, a Yemeni billionaire, and Lord Macdonald, the director of public prosecutions (DPP) in the UK at the time of Martine’s death.
After stepping down as DPP in October 2008, Ken Macdonald – who is co-founder of Matrix Chambers – subsequently met with Farouk Abdulhak in Yemen at the behest of his father Shaher. This revelation has outraged Petter, who describes it as ‘completely wrong’ for the man in charge of the CPS at the time of the murder to be in discussions with the chief suspect and his father.
Martine with Farouk Abdulhak in Mayfair on the night she died. He was the last person seen with her as they left the exclusive Maddox nightclub in the early hours of March 14, 2008, after celebrating their end-of-term exams
A six-year-old Martine Vik Magnussen poses excitedly for the camera at one of her first ballet lessons, in a picture her father Petter cherishes
The Epstein files also laid bare Epstein’s extraordinary close friendship with Mona Juul, Norway’s former ambassador to the UK. Petter blames her posting for what he claims was the Norwegian government’s sudden lack of interest in pursuing Farouk Abdulhak – more of which later.
Alongside Lord Macdonald, another legal big gun called upon by Shaher Abdulhak was Ian Burton, a founding member of London-based BCL Solicitors. His controversial clients have included Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed who, after his death, was exposed as a serial sexual predator.
More recently, Burton has been representing Epstein’s close friend Peter Mandelson, who is being investigated on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
Hello, I’m Alex Matthews, Editor of The Crime Desk.
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In the Spears 500 directory – a ‘Yellow Pages’ recommending experts in different fields to the super-wealthy – Burton is quoted as saying that ‘the trick in our game is not to win the fight, but to avoid there being a fight’.
But if that was Shaher Abdulhak’s aim in hiring him, then it failed.
Now, in light of the new Epstein documents, Petter is more determined than ever to see Farouk Abdulhak brought to account for what happened to his beloved daughter.
Martine had been raped and strangled before her half-naked body was buried beneath rubble in the basement of an apartment block near London’s Regent’s Park.
Suspicion immediately fell on Abdulhak, a fellow student at the nearby Regent’s Business School. A resident of the flats where Martine’s body was found, he was the last person seen with her as they left Mayfair’s exclusive Maddox nightclub in the early hours of March 14, 2008, after celebrating their end-of-term exams.
Just hours later, Abdulhak fled the UK on a scheduled flight to Cairo where he boarded his father’s private jet and flew to Yemen. Now 39, he is thought to have been living there ever since, presumably living off money inherited from his father Shaher, who died in 2020.
In an interview with the BBC in 2023 – the only instance he has spoken publicly – he admitted his involvement in Martine’s death for the first time, claiming it was a cocaine-fuelled ‘sex accident’.
Petter dismisses that idea, pointing out that the 43 cuts and scratches on her body showed that Martine had fought for her life during a violent attack.
‘It was definitely a sex act,’ he says. ’But it was forced upon Martine, who had only a very minor amount of cocaine in her blood.’
Last week, the Metropolitan Police said that the case remains open and that they will not stop pursuing Abdulhak. For his part, Petter will continue his relentless campaign to get justice for his daughter. And he insists that his priority is justice, rather than revenge. He has certainly had plenty of opportunity for the latter.
Martine moved to London to study international business and started hanging out with a fun-loving and well-heeled crowd who introduced her to the likes of Prince Harry
Petter describes Martine (pictured as a child) as a social butterfly, always inviting her friends over to enjoy a swim in the lake and relax in the little beach house he built on the shore beneath their home
‘I’ve had offers to kill or use force to bring [Farouk Abdulhak] back from approximately ten different groups. One said they would have a bullet put in his head in Yemen or leave him abandoned in front of a British police station. But I want Martine’s case to change international law so that the lack of an extradition treaty does not prevent a fugitive from being brought to justice.’
We talk while surrounded by reminders of the vibrant young woman Martine was, among them a photograph of father and daughter smiling happily on a weekend away in New York.
Equally poignant is the clay bust of Martine, positioned so that it gazes out of the sweeping windows overlooking the Oslofjord, the picturesque inlet surrounding the house.
Here, in this idyllic setting, Martine was raised as the middle of three children born to Petter and his now ex-wife Kristin (the couple divorced when Martine was a teenager).
Today in his 70s, he is grey-haired and infinitely more careworn than in another photo of him as a proud young father with Martine, then a toddler, sitting on his knee.
But still he lights up as he talks about Martine, describing her as a social butterfly, always inviting her friends over to enjoy a swim in the lake and relax in the little beach house he built on the shore beneath their home.
After she moved to London to study international business and started hanging out with a fun-loving and well-heeled crowd who introduced her to the likes of Prince Harry, Petter worried about her being distracted from her studies, but he couldn’t have been more wrong.
‘She managed to come top of her class,’ he says proudly.
He shows me Martine’s bedroom, where her clothes still hang in the wardrobe, and her bed is made as if she might be returning at any minute. Then he describes the shocking phone call he received on the evening of March 15, 2008. It was from Martine’s friends in London, telling him that she hadn’t been heard from since leaving the club with Abdulhak.
The next day, the family flew to London. Shortly after they landed, the police told them they had found Martine’s body.
‘We all went to identify her at the coroner’s court. She was lying there under a nice red blanket, looking so calm – exactly as we had seen her in bed during her childhood.
‘She still had make-up on from her last night, and she seemed so peaceful and familiar that I felt like we could wake her up. I just couldn’t leave the room because I knew it was the last time I was going to see Martine, but eventually I stroked her gently over the cheek and said goodbye.
Martine’s father, Odd Petter Magnussen – who goes by Petter – has spoken exclusively to the Daily Mail about the still unresolved case
Martine with her father Petter when she was a toddler. It is the first time since Martine’s murder in London 18 years ago that he has shared these pictures with a journalist
Farouk Abdulhak fled the UK on a scheduled flight to Cairo where he boarded his father’s private jet and flew to Yemen. Now 39, he is thought to have been living there ever since, presumably living off money inherited from his father Shaher, who died in 2020
Farouk and Martine are seen leaving a nightclub together on the night she died. Martine was later raped and strangled before her half-naked body was buried beneath rubble in the basement of an apartment block near London’s Regent’s Park, where Farouk lived
‘Packing her belongings in her flat and talking to the police kept the full impact of grief at some distance for me. But at one point, when I was alone in our hotel room, I ended up screaming my lungs out in despair.’
By then, Farouk Abdulhak was long gone. Brought up between the United States and Egypt, he had never lived in Yemen but his father, one of the country’s richest and most powerful men, persuaded then president Ali Abdullah Saleh to give his son a Yemeni passport.
‘Money talks,’ says Petter, and it certainly did for Shaher Abdulhak. Alongside Ian Burton, he also hired David Wilson, chairman of Bell Pottinger – a leading PR and crisis management firm of the time – as his spokesman in the UK.
The Epstein files shed no light on how Shaher Abdulhak and Jeffrey Epstein became acquainted but in one email Abdulhak Sr addresses the paedophile as ‘dear cousin brother’. Abdulhak, who made his vast fortune trading sugar, oil and arms, was certainly someone Epstein – shamelessly courting the ruling classes of the Middle East as he built his web of powerful contacts – would have made it his business to know.
That web also included British PR consultant Ian Osborne, a fixer for the rich and powerful. And it was Osborne who put Epstein in touch with Ken Macdonald, a top criminal defence QC who co-founded human rights chamber Matrix with Cherie Booth QC, wife of Tony Blair.
His appointment in 2003 as head of the CPS – a role bestowed on him by the attorney general, who was selected by the prime minister – was dogged by claims that he was a ‘Blair crony’. However, he served for five years, returning to private legal practice in the autumn of 2008, six months after Martine’s death. He was made a life peer in 2010.
In June 2012, following a phone conversation with Jeffrey Epstein, Lord Macdonald met Shaher Abdulhak in Paris. For that trip, according to an email sent from his practice manager to Abdulhak and included in the Epstein files, he was paid £20,000 and put up in a five-star hotel with first-class travel on Eurostar both ways.
A month later, Lord Macdonald flew to Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, to meet Abdulhak’s son, Farouk.
When questioned about this meeting after it was exposed in the Epstein files earlier this year, Lord Macdonald described it as a failed attempt to persuade Farouk Abdulhak to return to the UK to face justice. Last week he told the Mail that he went because ‘all diplomatic and legal attempts to secure his return had… long since hit a brick wall’.
That Lord Macdonald did not succeed is hardly surprising given that Shaher Abdulhak was implacably opposed to his son leaving Yemen, as was made clear at a meeting which Lord Macdonald and Ian Burton held with the Metropolitan Police in February 2013, the minutes of which are in the Epstein files.
Lord Macdonald, right, met Shaher Abdulhak in Paris In June 2012, following a phone conversation with Epstein, left
In an email to Epstein, Shaher Abdulhak speculated that his son might get away with a lesser sentence if convicted in the UK: ‘Something like house arrest, charity work’
Martine’s father claims that one of those involved in attempting to broker financial negotiations with him on Shaher Abdulhak’s behalf was Terje Rod-Larsen (pictured with the late Queen Elizabeth and his wife Mona Juul, Norway’s ambassador to the UK between 2014 and 2018)
Then, Burton said his instructions were to ‘uphold what is set out in the Yemeni constitution’ which ‘forbids the extradition of its nationals’.
This begs the question why Lord Macdonald, who has declined to say what he was paid for meeting Farouk Abdulhak, thought he might get him to come back voluntarily.
Lord Macdonald has said that since he no longer held the post of DPP at the time of the meetings with the Abdulhaks ‘there was nothing improper in any way in my involvement in this case’.
That may be so, legally speaking, but to the father of a murdered woman, it seems distasteful at the very least.
‘If the aim had simply been to return Farouk Abdulhak to the UK, there were clear legal and diplomatic routes available,’ Petter says. ‘Turning instead to a former UK head of prosecutions risks giving the impression that those routes were being sidestepped.’
He is equally furious about an email to Epstein in which Shaher Abdulhak speculated that his son might get away with a lesser sentence if convicted in the UK: ‘Something like house arrest, charity work’.
More insulting still was Abdulhak’s apparent attempt to buy Petter’s silence by paying him $50 million (approximately £36 million). This was the amount suggested after Petter had turned down several meetings he believed were aimed at discussing the possibility of a payout.
‘For me, that could never replace justice. I will never make a dime out of Martine’s tragedy,’ he says.
In addition to efforts to circumvent British justice, Petter also suspects Epstein’s hand in what he views as the Norwegian government’s disappointing response to his campaign for Abdulhak’s extradition.
He claims that one of those involved in attempting to broker financial negotiations with him on Shaher Abdulhak’s behalf was Terje Rod-Larsen, the husband of Mona Juul, Norway’s ambassador to the UK between 2014 and 2018.
Both had been much lauded for their role in facilitating the secret negotiations that led to the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the 1990s.
They got to know Epstein after Rod-Larsen – who has described him as his ‘best friend’ and a ‘thoroughly good human being’ – became president of the International Peace Institute (IPI) in 2005.
This publicly funded think tank works closely with the United Nations to promote peace, security and sustainable development. Rod-Larsen has since been accused of using his position to help secure visas for Russian models to serve as ‘interns’ there. One of them has since claimed she was among Epstein’s sexual abuse victims.
In 2020, Rod-Larsen was forced to resign for what he described as his ‘failed judgment’ in accepting a personal £95,000 loan from Epstein and securing around £500,000 in donations from him for the organisation, without the knowledge of the IPI’s board.
The association with Epstein has proved equally damaging to his wife’s career. After her posting to the UK, she became ambassador to Jordan and Iraq – positions she was forced to resign from in February after the Epstein files showed just how involved he was in the couple’s lives.
On several occasions, they and their twin children, Edward and Emma, visited Little Saint James, the Caribbean island later revealed as the central hub for Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. Epstein seemed to have been a mentor to Edward, becoming like a doting ‘uncle’ to him.
Various emails show how he arranged work experience for Edward at Christie’s auction house and advised him on how to speak, dress and even get his hair cut. In his will, Epstein left both Edward and Emma $5 million (£3.6 million).
Tragically, Edward, 25, died by suicide on April 29 this year as police investigated his parents’ financial ties to Epstein. Both Terje Rod-Larsen and Mona Juul deny any wrongdoing.
Epstein and Shaher Abdulhak are seen together in an image revealed in the Epstein files. Abdulhak was certainly someone Epstein – shamelessly courting the ruling classes of the Middle East as he built his web of powerful contacts – would have made it his business to know
Another legal big gun called upon by Shaher Abdulhak was Ian Burton, left, a founding member of London-based BCL Solicitors. Meanwhile, British PR consultant Ian Osborne, right, put Epstein in touch with Ken Macdonald
In a statement last week, Rod-Larsen’s lawyers said he had no recollection of an attempt by himself and Epstein to organise a meeting with Petter, while Mona Juul referred all questions to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
But Petter believes it is no coincidence that, during Mona Juul’s time as ambassador to the UK, there was what he describes as ‘continued inactivity’ when it came to the case.
Indeed, at a meeting held in February 2018, during Juul’s final period as ambassador, it was decided that Norway would no longer take any action regarding Farouk Abdulhak unless specifically asked to do so by the British authorities.
Petter remains suspicious about Epstein’s closeness to such prominent figures while he was still very much in touch with Shaher Abdulhak, as revealed by their numerous email exchanges.
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In one particularly unsavoury message, Epstein compared investing in a traditional industry to dating a woman who had grown older and uglier, suggesting that Abdulhak should instead put money into a tech start-up. Or, as he put it, ‘a young pretty thing with a long bright upside and future’.
Both men had residences in Paris and, in another email, they talked about how Epstein had given some of the old furniture from his apartment near the Arc de Triomphe to Abdulhak.
Is it too far-fetched to think that he did Abdulhak other favours, such as using his Norwegian contacts to sabotage efforts to bring his son to trial? Petter thinks not.
‘You don’t have to be Einstein to understand why nothing happened when Mona Juul was ambassador to the UK,’ he says.
He has vowed to keep lobbying for Farouk Abdulhak’s return, despite the grief which still overwhelms him ‘when [he] least expects it’.
‘You might be cutting a slice of bread or sitting in the car and hear something on the radio when it hits you,’ he says.
‘What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t keep going? I couldn’t look at Martine’s photos or at myself in the mirror if I did that.
‘Farouk Abdulhak is not worth my energy in hating him. But it’s his damn responsibility to tell us, as a family at least, what happened to Martine. And that’s what he’s going to do.
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