A cryptic email opens up the 2016 case of Nuseiba Hasan’s disappearance, and ‘Conviction’ has the story that many tried to keep hidden
The newest season of Gimlet’s “Conviction” is honing in on the mysterious disappearance of 26-year-old Nuseiba Hasan, a Jordanian-Canadian woman who vanished in 2006. Investigative journalist Habiba Nosheen hosts this season of “Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan,” because she’s been trying to find out just what happened to Nuseiba for three years now. But secrets that have been kept for nearly two decades aren’t destined to come easy.
“Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan” is a serialized podcast only available on Spotify. Previous seasons of this same show about criminal justice in America and the Satanic Panic were just seven episodes, so we are expecting this season to be about the same length. Episodes this season are just 30 minutes long so far.
This story actually starts 10 years after Nuseiba’s disappearance. On October 31st, 2016, police descended on a farm in Hamilton, Ontario, scouring the grounds for five days in search of evidence. And it’s possible that evidence could be in the form of a body. The farm was the last place Nuseiba was known to be alive and thus was the starting place of the police investigation.
But Habiba actually had no idea that all of this was going on. It wasn’t until the spring on 2019 that she even found out about Nuseiba when she received a cryptic email from someone saying they have information on Nuseiba Hasan. As an investigative reporter, Habiba is used to emails from strangers asking her to look into things, but this email stood out. Because this sender said they knew what happened to Nuseiba Hasan, but for their own safety they were afraid to come forward.
Habiba tells us that this story is full of secrets that have been safely hidden for decades, and there are many people who spent their entire lives keeping these secrets hidden. But the investigation into the disappearance of Nuseiba actually sprouts from a different secret, an investigation being carried out by a young woman in search of her birth mother. Yasmin was given up for adoption at two years old, something that only spurred Yasmin to dig deeper for the identity of her mother. Around the time of the farm raid in Hamilton, Yasmin was turning 18, and both she and her adopted mother had a strange feeling that the missing woman was who they had been searching for.
“Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan” takes us through multiple searches for the missing woman. She speaks with Yasmin and her adoptive mother as well as police detectives and dives into her own investigation into Nuseiba’s whereabouts. But the most mind-boggling part about all of this? While Nuseiba was last seen on that Hamilton farm in 2006, she wasn’t reported missing until early 2015.
This podcast features many key people in the investigation with vastly different theories. Habiba tries to piece together what she’s learned from those in charge, what she has found on her own, and what she’s learned from that mysterious email. She digs into Nuseiba’s life where she finds pivotal information that could have drastically changed how Nuseiba’s future played out. Hear how all of the facets of this story play out in “Conviction: The Disappearance of Nuseiba Hasan.”
Discover
