The Last Lunch
Although 40 years have passed since his assassination, the image of the late Yemeni president Ibrahim Al-Hamdi is still very much alive in people’s minds. Subsequent regimes did everything in their power to bury his legacy, but failed. The living proof of this could be found in the banners that carried his name and image during the 2011 revolution. But this was not the only reason why Al Jazeera produced an investigative documentary about him. The mysteries surrounding his murder and its implications for the political scene in Yemen were very compelling. The president and his brother were lured to a banquet, where they were murdered, in a flagrant violation of the local tradition. The assassins placed the dead bodies of two young French women next to the slain brothers. Al Jazeera’s documentary, titled ‘Yemen: The Last Lunch’, proved through documents and irrefutable evidence that the scene was staged. It revealed the true identities of the two women, proving that the implied ‘sexual scandal’ was fabricated. The Last Lunch Gamal Al-Moliky Senior Producer – Investigative, Al Jazeera News
As an investigative journalist, I felt it was my duty to solve that four-decade-old mystery. To start, I sketched out three key questions, hoping I’d reach a lead: 1. How was Al-Hamdi murdered? 2. Why has his legacy lived on? And 3. Why was he considered a threat, locally, regionally, and even internationally? It took us a year of hard work, particularly because most of the witnesses were either deceased or avoided talking to journalists. By the end of the documentary, we took our viewers to the point nearest to the truth that had been intentionally concealed for years. It sent shockwaves through Yemen and the Arab world. Due to its significance, I also produced an English version of the film. It later made headlines in the West and some foreign researchers picked up on it. The American historian Stephen Day, a professor of international affairs at Holt School of Rollins College in Florida, wrote that the film, which showed strong pieces of evidence, will remain the closest to the truth of what happened in 1977. Gamal Gasim, a professor of political science at Grand Valley State University in the US, wrote: “The tragic killing of President Al-Hamdi, alongside his own brother Abd Allah Al-Hamdi and two other French women on October 11, 1977, has been a mysterious political taboo during the entire reign of former President Ali Abd Allah Saleh. With Al- Jazeera Arabic’s release of this documentary, the door is now opened for further formal investigation.”
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