Overview
Wael Kiwan grew up in Batir, a Druze village in the mountains about 70 kilometres east of Beirut. His mother said that at about four he began saying that his name was Rabih, that he had been big rather than small, and that he had other parents in Beirut. He talked mostly about the sea and a boat, drew a ship’s wheel and moved his hands as if steering it. He said he had lived near a mosque in Jal al Bahr, a district of Beirut by the sea, and mentioned a house with a red roof.1
He told the same story of his death again and again: at sunset people came towards him and shot him. In another version, his mother said, a group of people kicked and hit him until he could feel nothing. A week before Wael was born she had dreamed of a young man with a moustache and an open shirt, sweating and struggling to breathe, who she later thought looked like Rabih’s photograph.1
Identification
Wael’s father, Kamal, often went to Beirut on business, and Wael was upset each time he came home without having found the house. If they did find it, Wael said, they should not tell the family that Rabih had died, because they would cry. He added that he used to jump from his balcony to the street and that he had two homes, one of them reached by airplane.1
When the family read out surnames to him, Wael rejected each until they reached Assaf, which he accepted as his own, although it is a common name among Druze, Christians and Muslims. A Druze friend of Kamal’s in Beirut, Sami Zhairi, asked around and heard of a young man called Rabih Assaf who seemed to fit. Zhairi died three years before the case was investigated.1
About a year after Wael’s first statements, his father and Zhairi took him to a house in Jal al Bahr. Wael ran ahead into the ground-floor apartment and said a photograph on the wall was his picture; it was of Rabih. According to his father, he also picked out Rabih’s father, sister and an aunt in a family album. Back home he kept a photograph of Rabih under his pillow.1
The previous life
Rabih Assaf, born on 12 August 1964, grew up with his mother, Munira, in a ground-floor apartment near the sea. At 21 he went to study electrical engineering in the United States, but by his third year he could neither afford to stay nor go home because of the civil war in Lebanon. Depressed, he had already survived one suicide attempt when, on 9 January 1988, a cousin found him hanged in South Pasadena, California.1
On a later visit Wael did not recognize Munira, Rabih’s twin sister or his brother. What persuaded Munira was that on his first visit he had asked about a house with a red roof. Such a house had stood behind their building, in Rabih’s view from the apartment, but it had been pulled down before Wael came. She accepted him as her son reborn, while saying that nothing would bring her son back.1
Investigation
Erlendur Haraldsson and Majd Abu-Izzeddin interviewed Wael’s family in March 1999, when he was eleven, and again in January 2001, as well as Munira and two relatives who had known Rabih in California. Wael’s parents listed seventeen statements, all of which they said he had made before Rabih was traced. The investigators found that twelve matched Rabih’s life, four could be neither confirmed nor refuted, and one was wrong.1
Munira said Rabih often jumped from the balcony to the street. The only mosque in Jal al Bahr stood about 100 metres away, and a fishermen’s harbour lay some 30 metres down the street; Rabih often went to sea with fishermen, some of them friends and cousins. Their boats were mostly rowed or steered by a tiller, so the investigators thought a wheel unlikely, though possible. The home reached by airplane fitted Rabih’s years in the United States. Wael’s recognitions were only vaguely confirmed by Rabih’s mother and brother.1
Assessment and later life
The investigators saw it as a strength that the families lived far apart and had been strangers, and as the main weakness that, as in all their Lebanese cases, nothing was written down until after the families met. It is also unclear whether Wael mentioned the red-roofed house beforehand: his mother listed it among his early statements, but Munira and the report’s discussion place it at his first visit.1
The one major mismatch was the manner of death. Rabih hanged himself, while Wael spoke mostly of being shot, and none of Rabih’s relatives knew of him being beaten. Calling it speculation, the authors wondered whether Wael’s plea not to tell the family of Rabih’s death, and his mother’s dream of a man fighting for breath, might relate to the hanging. They concluded that enough of his statements were specific for a paranormal interpretation to seem not unreasonable.1
After the visit to Beirut Wael said little about the previous life, though the families stayed in touch and he sometimes spoke to Rabih’s family by telephone. At eleven he said he was forgetting, but in 2001 he still remembered being shot; the authors noted that memories of a death often last longest.1