A suicidal woman who chatted online with Nadia Kajouji urged the missing Carleton University student to kill herself on the same day she disappeared, her distraught father told a press conference here yesterday.
At times weeping and holding his face in his hands, Mohamad Kajouji said police last week delivered up to 20 pages of online correspondence to him that included a March 9 MSN Messenger exchange between his 18-year-old daughter and an unknown woman who “encouraged (Nadia) to take her own life.”
“She seemed to know a lot about suicide, ropes and guns. She spent the whole day talking to my daughter.”
Today marks one month since the first-year public affairs and policy student at Carleton disappeared, sparking citywide searches for her. She had told friends she planned to go skating on the Rideau Canal before she went missing.
The unidentified online chatter, who threatened to end her own life on March 10, suggested that Nadia do the same, Kajouji said. Although Kajouji doesn’t know who the woman is, he believes she lived in the United States and she met Nadia online.
Although he has acknowledged that Nadia’s death is a possibility, Kajouji said he couldn’t believe his daughter would kill herself, adding she would have to be “sky high” on medication for depression to even consider it.
“There’s no way my daughter can do that,” he said, adding that he would continue to search for her.
Kajouji criticized city police for deciding so quickly that his daughter’s disappearance was a suicide.
“I don’t think they should have wrote her off,” he said. “They already made up their minds three or four days after.”
Police have told the family that in two weeks’ time, or when it is safe to do so, they will send a dive team to search the Ottawa River.
While Kajouji left Ottawa to make a brief visit to a friend in Montreal yesterday, he said he intends to continue the search for his daughter when he returns.
“I will never, ever stop,” he said. “I will always keep looking for her.”
tracey.tong@metronews.ca