ABU DHABI // Education officials will begin an investigation today into the death on Thursday of a four-year-old girl who was left alone all morning on the private minibus that took her to school.
The Abu Dhabi Education Zone (Adez) will visit the Indian Model School in Musaffah to try to determine who was at fault in the death of Aiman Zeeshanuddin.
"We were very horrified to hear about this, of course, and it has had us all upset for the past few days," said Mohammed al Dhaheri, director of Adez.
"As an education zone, we care about the performance of each of our schools and will prosecute the school accordingly if it was in the wrong in any way."
"But at the same time," he added, "we urge parents to be careful about the transportation methods they choose to get their kids to and from school."
Abu Dhabi Police refused yesterday to talk about the incident.
Aiman's chatter and loud laughter are now missing from the narrow corridors of the villa in Khalifa City A, where her parents rent a room.
"My beautiful girl, so beautiful," said her mother, Sobia Zeeshanuddin from Pakistan. "Finished now. Gone."
Last night, the girl's father, Sayed Zeeshanuddin, left on an Etihad flight to Pakistan with his wife and remaining daughter, 11-month-old Areej, to bury the body of Aiman. The family fear they will never know why Aiman did not get off the bus that day.
"Maybe she fell asleep, we think maybe," said Mr Zeeshanuddin, who has been working as a technician for the Gulf Aircraft Maintenance Company, Gamco, since Feb 2006.
"But she is a very active child and she never sleeps on the bus. She is always so anxious to reach school; she loves school. But I don't know, maybe that day, she fell asleep."
Like every school morning, Aiman was walked to the villa's gate at 6.45am by her mother to wait for the bus commissioned by Mr Zeeshanuddin and other fathers in the area to transport their children to schools in Musaffah.
The regular school bus does not come to their area, they said.
Based on the advice of a neighbour, Mr Zeeshanuddin arranged for a private bus driver, also from Pakistan, to include Aiman on his morning route.
"The driver is very good," he said. "We never had problems with him."
Sobia, who is three months pregnant with her third child, added: "The bus driver loves my daughter. He always smiles to pick her up. He told us she is the life of his bus."
The driver asked her not to always tie Aiman's hair up," she said. "She has such beautiful, black, silky hair."
Mr Zeeshanuddin had taken Thursday off from work, and at 11.30 he headed to his daughter's school to pick her up.
"Since I was off that day, my wife told me why not to pick Aiman up myself, so I went," he explained.
"I go to the KG gate, but Aiman was not there. I asked the teacher, where is she, and the teacher said, 'But Aiman is absent'. I told the teacher that Aiman went to school that day. The teacher kept insisting. I said, 'I am the father! I know'."
A school-wide search for Aiman began, in the playgrounds, in the washrooms - anywhere the girl could have hidden. Meanwhile, her father called the bus driver.
"He told me that he had dropped Aiman off at school, but I told him she wasn't here," Mr Zeeshanuddin said. "He said he will go back to his bus and call me from there."
By then, Aiman's father headed to his car and started driving through the streets, searching for his daughter.
A few minutes later, the bus driver called him back. "He told me to come quick to the industrial area of Musaffah," Mr Zeeshanuddin said.
"He said he found my daughter but she is very ill. He gave me an address I didn't know. I called up a friend who came with me to help."
When Mr Zeeshanuddin arrived at where the bus was parked, the area was already swarming with police cars. "The driver had called the police already," he said.
"I walked into the bus and she was just sitting there. She looked like she was sleeping. She was in the centre seat, with her head to the side, just sitting like she is sleeping."
Mr Zeeshanuddin said the police immediately took the bus driver into custody.
Ten days before the accident occurred, the Zeeshanuddin family had just returned from an Umrah trip - a religious pilgrimage - to Saudi Arabia.
"Aiman loved the Umrah trip we took," her father said. "She understood the religious importance of it."
Aiman, who was born in Pakistan but came to Abu Dhabi with her mother in January 2007 after her father had set up a home for the family, was described by her parents, uncle and neighbours as an intelligent, social and gifted child. The little girl could speak fluent English and Urdu.
"She touched the Ka'aba and came to tell me about it," her mother said of the cube-like structure in Mecca that is the centre of the Muslim world.
"She told me, 'Mama, I knocked on the door of the Ka'aba; maybe God will answer me soon!' God has listened to my little girl."
hkhalaf@thenational.ae
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Ahmad El Sayed is Senior Associate at Charles Russell Speechlys, a law firm headquartered in London with offices in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Hong Kong.
Experience: Commercial litigator who has assisted clients with overseas judgments before UAE courts. His specialties are cases related to banking, real estate, shareholder disputes, company liquidations and criminal matters as well as employment related litigation.
Education: Sagesse University, Beirut, Lebanon, in 2005.
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Name: Infinite8
Based: Dubai
Launch year: 2017
Number of employees: 90
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Europe’s rearming plan
- Suspend strict budget rules to allow member countries to step up defence spending
- Create new "instrument" providing €150 billion of loans to member countries for defence investment
- Use the existing EU budget to direct more funds towards defence-related investment
- Engage the bloc's European Investment Bank to drop limits on lending to defence firms
- Create a savings and investments union to help companies access capital
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