Syrian scammer who killed millionairess and dumped her physique in a bin

Only when you know the context of the video, does its true horror become apparent.

A young man is dancing and gyrating on the driveway of a smart looking house in north London – ‘busting some moves’, as some might say – in some trendy new clothes.

He looks rather pleased with himself, like he has something to celebrate.

The video, posted on TikTok, was recorded by kebab shop worker Mohamed El-Abboud, 29, almost exactly three years ago.

What we know now, however, is just two days before posting that video, he’d throttled the owner of that house – 71-year-old Louise Kam – with a hair dryer cord, and then stuffed her dead body into a wheelie bin.

The gentle, church-going, mother of two had been lured to the property by El-Abboud and his co-conspirator Kusai Al-Jundi, 26, in £4.6million scam, intended to steal Louise’s multi-million property portfolio.

Sickeningly in the days before the murder, as they hatched their evil plot, El-Abboud had moved into the empty property in Barnet, from where he recorded videos of him dancing with a model, and mocking Louise’s ‘wealth and good fortune’.

Ultimately the videos would form part of the net that snared the killers.

Duped, scammed and lured to her death by two callous conmen. It was not the end anyone – let alone a dignified lady like Louise Kam – deserved.

That her life should have ended the way it did is a source of unending agony to those who knew and loved her.

As her close friend Kambiz Rohany, who spoke exclusively to the Mail this week, says: ‘It is like somebody gave you the best diamond in the world and suddenly someone grabs it from you and breaks it.

‘Louise had a golden heart, she only wanted to help other people, that’s all she did. If ever someone needed help, she would be there for them. She would not refuse anybody. I hate to think about what happened to that angel, alone in the hands of those two lunatics.’

It has been three years since Louise was murdered, but the circumstances in which she died, and her friend’s unwitting role in introducing her to her killers are etched in Kambiz’s memory.

The chain of events leading up to and after Louise’s death is played out in vivid detail in a newly-released Channel 5 documentary, Body in the Bin – The Murder of Louise Kam, which uses CCTV footage and social media footage, the latter created by one of her killers, to reconstruct the murder.

Within hours of strangling Louise, the killer had sold her BMW convertible for cash, spending the proceeds on new clothes before going on to post that obscene video of himself on TikTok, dancing on his victim’s driveway, in those same new clothes.

Kambiz Rohany, 61, who shared much of the last 18 years of his life with Louise, was a key witness in the case that brought the evil pair to justice.

His loss was too raw for him to want to participate in the documentary, but this week he spoke exclusively to the Mail, sharing his memories of Louise and his enduring regret over the unwittingly part he played in her demise.

‘I blame myself, to be honest,’ says the loyal friend and companion who, like Louise, started his life many thousands of miles away, in Iran, before making Britain his home.

He is sitting in the Willesden Green flat that Louise – a divorcee who ran a business supplying catering equipment, before moving into property – owned, and his anguish is palpable.

‘The thought of losing Louise makes my hair stand on end,’ he says. ‘I have nightmares, I cannot sleep.’

He’d introduced Louise to her killers after meeting Al-Jundi at the kebab shop, just over the road from Louise’s property, in Willesden, where he worked as a chef alongside El-Abboud.

‘I was at his restaurant and he said to me, “I want to buy a property, I have a rich girlfriend, I want to pay cash and I will even pay extra.”‘

Aware that Louise was looking to liquidate some of her assets – she owned three flats in Willesden, as well as a £1.3million house in Barnet, and another property in Potters Bar – Kambiz made the fateful introduction.

‘She told me she wanted to retire,’ he says regretfully. ‘She said, “I don’t want to work anymore, all those years when I was younger, I didn’t have enough time to take care of the children. I want to spend my time with my children, that’s my duty as a mother.”’

As the Old Bailey heard during the murder trial last year, Syrian Al-Jundi was a ‘Walter Mitty’ character who liked to present himself – convincingly, it would seem – as a ‘person of means’.

He claimed to have a wealthy girlfriend called Anna who was willing to put up £4.6 million to buy Louise’s property portfolio in an elaborate deal which involved Louise ‘gifting’ him the properties, thereby avoiding tax.

In fact, if you discount the two flashy cars he’d conned out of another woman customer, Al-Jundi had no assets, no rich girlfriend and actually lived with his mother, his wife and their children, in Harrow.

Tragically, Louise’s youngest son, Greg, was highly sceptical of the deal, and had warned his mother it could be a scam, but she was attracted by the scale of the profits and the desire to help her sons financially.

In a ‘carefully orchestrated deception’, months in the planning, Al-Jundi persuaded Louise, who spoke Mandarin and French, to sign a Lasting Power of Attorney document in a bid to seize control of her finances, while also instructing a solicitor to draw up legal papers to transfer her properties into his name.

By the time Louise arrived at the Barnet home on July 26, 2001, to finalise the so-called deal, her fate was, the court told, already decided.

As the Channel 5 documentary so vividly illustrates, the timeline of what happened that day is all the more heartbreaking because so much of it plays out on CCTV footage.

At 2.55pm Louise, a woman whose slim frame and dark hair made her look considerably younger than her years, gets behind the wheel of her black BMW and sets off for Barnet.

At 3.02pm, Kambiz phones Louise and she tells him she is meeting Al-Jundi, a solicitor and his mysterious female backer to finalise the deal. His heart, he tells the Mail this week, sank; but he pushed aside his nagging worries. It would be the last time he spoke to the woman he describes as a ‘good businesswoman’, albeit one who cared more for people than she did money.

The horrifying details of what happened next is something only those who were in that house that day can give a full account of.

Police would establish that El-Abboud, Al-Jundi and a Romanian woman, Maria Amariucai, were at the Barnet home that day.

Al-Jundi and Maria (she told police she was not his girlfriend, though messages between them would suggest the two were very close) then left the property at 3.13pm.

In an apparent attempt to establish an alibi, Al-Jundi took Maria to a jewellery store on Willesden High Road where he bought her a £580 pair of diamond earrings as a gift, while back at the house El-Abboud and Louise remained.

The subsequent police investigation would reveal Louise was strangled with the cord of a hairdryer, they very hairdryer seen lying on the ground behind El-Abboud in one of the posturing, preening videos he posted to social media in the days leading up to the murder.

There was a violent struggle lasting 30 to 40 seconds before Louise’s life ebbed away.

If the crime was calculated, the cover-up was shambolic.

El-Abboud would confess to Maria that he had ‘killed that lady’ later that day, as he drove his fellow Romanian back to her home in Coventry. She would become a key witness for the prosecution.

On the very same day he wrapped a cord around his victim’s neck, El-Abboud moved Louise’s BMW 3 series convertible around the corner from where she’d parked it, then sold it on Facebook marketplace a day later.

Ultimately, El-Abboud would attempt to blame everything on his co-conspirator, but the court was told that both men ‘did this together’: Al-Jundi boasting he would make a ‘significant amount of money’ from Louise’s death and that a share of it would be El-Abboud’s reward.

Phone records established that the killers had a 22-minute phone conversation in the aftermath of the murder, before meeting (captured on CCTV, again) at the kebab shop where they both worked to collect cleaning products. They then returned to Barnet, wrapping Louise’s body in plastic bags and a duvet, putting it in a wheelie bin and covering it with garden rubbish.

Brazenly and bizarrely, Al-Jundi then arranged for three entirely unsuspecting men to move the wheelie bin in a van to the driveway of his own home in Harrow, where it remained until police found it on August 1.

In the interim, the killers took Louise’s phone and bank cards, sending poorly written text messages to her friends and family saying she had gone to China.

Little did they know, as they fired off puzzled replies and reported her missing to police, she was already dead.

They even questioned Al-Jundi, but he had the audacity to claim that Louise had deceived him and left the country, taking his money with her.

Both men were found guilty of murder at the Central Criminal Court in January 2023, and sent to prison for life.

Back in Willesden Green, Kambiz Rohany is a broken man.

Kambiz, whose close friendship with Louise dates back to when he became her tenant, 18 years ago, speaks with deep affection of a woman who shared with him her own journey from China to the UK, as a child.

‘They [her family] were aristocrats in China, Louise’s grandfather had a plant producing tea in Shanghai. But he was shot dead when Mao Zedong and the Communists came and took their whole fortune.’

He recounts how after they were forced to flee China, Louise’s father took her older siblings to the USA, while her mother, a shrewd businesswoman with a degree in English from an American university in Shanghai, took Louise and sister Ruth to Hong Kong and then the UK. She’d brought with her a carefully-concealed bundle of antiques which she used to set up a Chinese restaurant in north London.

‘Louise and her sister helped their mother in the restaurant in their free-time after school,’ says Kambiz.

In 1972 Louise married an Englishman, Frank Kam, and they had two sons, before divorcing.

‘She gave money to charities for vulnerable children and mental health and she was a baptised Christian woman who went to church every Sunday,’ says Kambiz. ‘She was very modest, always dressed nicely, but nothing fancy, it was always Marks & Spencer, something like that.

‘All her tenants saw her as a friend. She was always smiling, always friendly.’

Such was her generosity, he admits, early in their friendship, she invested in an Iranian restaurant they launched together, but that went out of business four years later.

He was trying to find an opportunity for Louise, to boost her morale after a failed attempt to set up a medical supplies company during the pandemic, when he made the fateful introduction. How he wishes he could turn the clock back,

He recalls his own mounting worries as he tried repeatedly to call Louise, speaking to her family, speaking to anyone who might know where she was.

‘They sent all these messages from her mobile. I replied saying, “You are not Louise, where is my Louise?”.’

He doesn’t like to think of the 20-40 seconds it took for Louise’s last breath to be snuffed out, or of the fight she so clearly put up in those final moments.

After that they took Louise’s body and put a plastic bag over her lovely face, took her credit cards, new iPhone and put her body in the garden bin,’ he says.

He is, he says, a ‘lonely and broken man’ – distraught at the loss of a woman who ‘loved and cared for so many’.

‘So many miss her,’ he says.

In court he put it thus: ‘Time doesn’t heal. Now and for the rest of our lives, I and all that loved her, will live knowing of the brutality she suffered, to her last breath, the disregard of her remains, where no pity or mercy was had.’

This week, surrounded by memories, he says: ‘I am Iranian and if we were in Iran, these two would hang.’