2008 ASHEKIAN, Ani-11/10/2008, Hong Kong-30

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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/Sister+launch...1320/story.html

Sister to launch appeal into Ont. woman's Hong Kong disappearance

Ani Ashekian last seen in Hong Kong in mid November

Canwest News ServiceJanuary 7, 2009

StoryPhotos ( 1 )

Ani Ashekian (pictured) disappeared in Nomember in Hong Konk. Her sister Sossy Ashekian is travelling to the port city to make a public appeal to help find her.Photograph by: Handout, Canwest News ServiceHONG KONG - The sister of a Canadian woman missing in Hong Kong arrived in the Chinese city Tuesday, where she will make a public appeal for help in finding Ani Ashekian.

Ashekian, a 30-year-old Windsor, Ont., native who calls Toronto home, has been missing since mid November. She was last heard from during a seven-week-long trip from China to India.

Sossy Ashekian, Ani’s younger sister, is to hold a news conference in front of the Hong Kong police headquarters Thursday at 1 p.m. local time, or midnight EST, according to a statement issued by findani.com, a website launched by her friends and family.

She will join a growing team of volunteers circulating pictures of Ani on the bustling streets of Hong Kong.

An $8,000 reward ($50,000 in Hong Kong currency) is being offered for information on the woman’s mysterious disappearance

Sightings of women fitting Ashekian’s description have been reported since November.

The most recent was Jan. 4 when Emily Brule, a 23-year-old preschool teacher from Canada, was mistaken for Ashekian in an area where surveillance cameras last saw her withdrawing money from an ATM on Nov. 9.

Ashekian’s family have praised the work of the Hong Kong police, who they say have updated them daily with any information into her disappearance.

Ashekian was to leave for Canada from Delhi on Dec. 15.

With files from the Windsor Star

© Copyright © Canwest News Service

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http://z10.invisionfree.com/usedtobedoe/in...showtopic=41309

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By DON PEAT, Sun Media


Public plea in Hong Kong for missing sister

TORONTO - The sister of a Toronto paralegal made a public plea in Hong Kong yesterday for help in solving the disappearance.

Sossy Ashekian travelled to the Chinese territory earlier this week to look for her sibling, Ani.

Ani has been missing since Nov. 8.

Hong Kong police showed Ani's boyfriend, Wenddell Walsh, video of the 30-year-old looking nervous as she removed money from an ATM machine at the Causeway Bay MTR Station.

“We are deeply grateful to everyone in Hong Kong who is helping us so much,” Sossy Ashekian said in a press release late last night. "I hope we’ll have more information after we’ve spoken with the authorities here. Everyone at home is so worried about her and we need to know that she is okay."
http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Canada/200...07/7948286.html

[PorchlightCanada]

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=1160714

Duncan Mavin, National Post
Published: Friday, January 09, 2009


HandoutAni Ashekian was planning on traveling to China, India, Vietnam and Cambodia, and then she went missing in Hong Kong.
HONG KONG -- Sossy Ashekian wept yesterday among the crowds of shoppers on a crisper-than-normal winter's morning at bustling Causeway Bay, one of Hong Kong's busiest neighbourhoods. Tightly she gripped a placard high above her head showing a photo of her sister Ani, a 30-year old Canadian paralegal who has been missing here in Hong Kong for exactly two months.

"This is the hardest thing I've done so far," Ms. Ashekian said. After flying half way around the world from Toronto on Tuesday, the 27-year-old waitress has worked almost non-stop to raise publicity, visiting radio stations, holding press interviews, and handing out flyers about her sister's disappearance.

"You don't expect something like this to happen to you. You don't wish it upon anybody's family. It is the worst feeling."

She mostly held a brave face at a press conference outside the Hong Kong police headquarters on Thursday, but Ms. Ashekian stood and cried among the shoppers on Friday morning.

Her older sister Ani is the middle of three girls -- "definitely the sporty one, spontaneous and outgoing" -- whose parents run a dry cleaning business in Windsor, Ont. On a whim, she left Toronto in late October for Beijing with a couple of friends and continued on to Hong Kong alone with plans to visit Cambodia and Vietnam before returning home via India before Christmas.

She arrived in Hong Kong on November 9th and sent a brief text message to her older sister Rosie the next day, when there is also a confirmed sighting of her in Chungking Mansions, a nest of low-cost hostels and guest houses right around the corner from Hong Kong's swanky and famed Peninsula Hotel, but which lies way off the tourist map in almost every other way.

The 17-storey tower block is a labyrinth of curry houses, wire transfer offices, and dirt-cheap hostels with inapt names like "Las Vegas" and "Fortunate Guesthouse."

Budget travellers sleep here alongside some of Hong Kong's poorest immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Two Austrian backpackers, Franz and Stephanie, said yesterday they feel safe in the building, where they pay only a few US dollars a night for a very small double room. The front door is locked at night and there are always police around, they added. One of four police officers hanging around the entrance to the building on Friday lunchtime described it as "not dangerous."

But Chungking Mansions, with its dimly-lit hallways and dirty elevators, is notorious among locals as a hub of petty crime and unsanitary, unsafe accommodation. A Danish backpacker died here in a fire that killed 11 people in 1988. A 36-year old Indian woman was strangled to death in one of the guest houses in 1995. The building featured in the movie Chungking Express, which centered partly on the underworld drugs scene.

The youngest Ms. Ashekian traced her sister's footsteps around Chunking Mansions this week.

"That's definitely not a place that I would stay. Everything about it is shady. It doesn't look like a place I would feel safe in at night," she said.

But she said her adventurous, well-travelled, older sister "would definitely try it for a night." She said her sister had travelled through the Caribbean, South America and Europe, often travelling and hiking alone, and also reaching out "to help needy people."

CCTV footage shows Ms. Ashekian at around midnight on November 10 withdrawing a few hundred dollars from an ATM in Causeway Bay, where there is another smattering of backpacker hostels. But since then, the Ontarian has apparently disappeared leaving no trace. There have been no emails, no text messages or phone calls home. Her credit card has not been used and no more cash has been withdrawn from her bank account. She was due to fly back to Canada through India on December 15 but never showed up.

The large Canadian community in Hong Kong is "quite shocked and confused" by the case, said Andrew Work, executive director at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. "People just don't disappear here. Hong Kong is a small place with well-controlled borders so you can't just ‘go'."

Dozens of expats have volunteered their time to hand out search posters, which are now displayed in a number of Canadian-owned stores and restaurants. Vancouverite Chelsea Tsuchiya and her boyfriend – who heard about the case on Facebook ‑ even gave up a bed for Ms. Ashekian's boyfriend Wendell Walsh when he arrived on Boxing Day to raise more publicity about his girlfriend's disappearance.

"We have to do our part," Ms. Tsuchiya said this week. "I've never known anybody to be missing in my life. I'm going to keep helping until we find some answers."

As the missing woman's younger sister prepared to travel back to Canada, she praised the "amazing" response of the Hong Kong police and the Canadian Consul. "I can't tell you how grateful the family is for the help we've been getting," she said.

Meanwhile, the island's police force is apparently baffled by the case. There have been several unconfirmed sightings of Ms. Ashekian around Hong Kong, and there is even a theory she may have spontaneously gone away to a spiritual retreat. But a person close to the case said there appear to be no real leads at this stage.

For Sossy Ashekian that means returning home to a family that is "not doing good" with more questions than answers. Still, the youngest Ashekian sister remains outwardly hopeful.

"In my heart, honestly, my instinct about my sister is that I don't think she has passed on," she said. "I just think she needs our help."

Close

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Official website of Ani Ashekian:

http://www.findani.com/


Facebook search page for Ani Ashekian:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54077259736

[PorchlightCanada]

Author Finds Real Case Mirrors FictionBy MICHAEL CONNELLY, CNN
posted: 15 HOURS 2 MINUTES AGOcomments: 10PRINT|E-MAILMOREText SizeAAALOS ANGELES (Oct. 29) -- The saying goes that life imitates art. But that's the last thing you want when you write crime fiction. You never want to see the things you write about mirrored back to you in real life.
But a month ago as I prepared to publish and promote my latest detective novel, "Nine Dragons," I learned of a true mystery with eerie similarities and connections to my story and my research. It has been a heart-tugging reminder that while crime novels may be entertaining thrill rides and puzzles, they also skirt the shores of reality for many.
Before writing novels I worked as a police and crime reporter in Los Angeles. What I saw and wrote about back then became the grist of my fiction. In that case, art imitating life. I took real stories -- a daring bank heist, a conversation with a killer, the unsolved murder of a sports agent found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce -- and turned them into fictionalized investigations in which my fictional hero, Detective Harry Bosch, always won the day.
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Robert Azmitia, Little, Brown / AP
While researching his latest detective novel in Hong Kong, author Michael Connelly discovered some eerie similarities between his plot and a real-life missing person case. He wrote about the disturbing coincidence in a special piece for CNN.com.

That was fine. That worked. What was done was done and I could bend the truth and make the story my own in fiction. I think that is the crime novelist's job, to take inspiration from the real world and to turn it back as something that entertains, puzzles and maybe -- if you're good -- even reflects the world back at the reader. To me, there is an art in that.
But this time things have gone the other way. In "Nine Dragons," Harry Bosch is working a murder case in Los Angeles when he gets word that his young daughter has disappeared in Hong Kong. It's every father's nightmare. Harry drops everything, including his case, and flies to Hong Kong to find her. He traces her last known location to a spot in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood of Kowloon called Chungking Mansions. After that point, she has vanished.
Chungking Mansions is a well-known place to many travelers to Asia. It is sort of a modern Casablanca, a crossroads of the world. It is several cut-rate hotels housed in one large and old building, and all of it above a world bazaar where dozens of languages are spoken, and food and other comfort items from almost any country in Asia can be found and purchased. It is the kind of place where Harry Bosch checks his back repeatedly as he walks through.
It is also the kind of place where I checked my back repeatedly when I walked through while researching the book. This was because I had a camera behind me.
Last November I went to Hong Kong and visited Chungking Mansions repeatedly as I made a final research journey while writing the book. Filmmaker Terrill Lee Lankford went with me so he could document my research of the places that would be in the novel. This was so I could refer to video while writing about Hong Kong once I returned home. It was also so he could make small films that could be used to document and promote the book when it was published. This is where the real life mystery entered my seemingly harmless world of crime fiction. I live in Florida and Lankford lives in California. As he put together short films on my visit to Hong Kong, he used YouTube to privately send me rough edits over the Internet. Lankford noticed that YouTube had connected his films by subject matter to another film about Hong Kong and Chungking Mansions. I took a look and the troubling connection between fact and fiction began.
The other film was about the disappearance of 31-year-old Canadian tourist Ani Ashekian from Hong Kong, and more specifically Chungking Mansions. What's more is that Ani's last sighting was on November 10, 2008, just two days before I arrived in Hong Kong and visited Chungking Mansions myself.
In the details the stories are quite different. Ani Ashekian was a veteran traveler who enjoyed solo journeys from Toronto, Canada. She came to Hong Kong after visiting mainland China and stayed in a hotel at the Chungking Mansions. In Nine Dragons, Bosch's daughter is only 13 and a whole different set of circumstances take her to the same building.
But the crossroads of fiction and reality still leaves a pit in my stomach. Nobody really gets hurt or vanishes for good in fiction. But it's been almost a year now and nobody has heard from Ani. Her passport and credit cards have not been used. The very last sighting of her is on November 10 on an ATM camera in Causeway Bay across the harbor from Kowloon. The very last communication is a text she sent to her niece in Toronto on the same day. She offered Happy Birthday wishes.
Thinking that maybe she was still at Chungking Mansions on November 12 when I got there, I have repeatedly looked at the video taken over two days by Lankford. There are hundreds of faces moving in and out of the camera's frame, but none appear to be Ani. Whatever happened may have already happened by then.
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More StoriesThe police in Hong Kong have been investigating the disappearance. So too have private investigators, a veteran reporter for the South China Morning Post, as well as Ani's family. But nobody has moved the mystery past that ATM photo. Her journey was supposed to end on December 15 with her return to Toronto from India. She never made it to India or back home.
Ani has vanished without anything to go on. And that's where this gets to me. In crime fiction, there is always something to go on. When Harry Bosch's daughter disappears, he finds a clue at Chungking Mansions and the case moves on. He is a relentless father who will stop at nothing to find her. But in real life it doesn't always happen that way. You can't be relentless with nothing to go on. Sometimes there is no direction and no answers and families and other loved ones are left with an unabated dread that hollows out their lives. Still, with stories like the recent rescue of the long ago abducted Jaycee Dugard in the news, nobody gives up hope. Sometimes hope is all that is left.
I remember this from my days as a reporter -- that hollow dread and desperate hope I could read in the eyes of some of the people I interviewed -- and I thought I had left it all behind for the comfortable confines of fiction. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Now when I think back on my research trip to Hong Kong, I think of the young woman from Toronto who visited the same place and never returned home.
© 2009 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
2009-10-29 16:30:51
http://news.aol.com/article/author-michael...l-life%2F743975