LOBNA Yakout was left stunned after getting a call to say her ex-husband had been arrested for the torture and murder of three women.
But the 30-year-old mum-of-one, from Belfast, did know exactly what her abusive partner of seven years, Karim Selim, 37, was like – a dangerous man who’d even kidnapped their five-year-old son when she’d dared to escape his clutches.
Selim, an English teacher and social media influencer, was handed the death penalty in his home country of Egypt in 2024 after being found guilty of torturing, killing and sexually abusing three women at his home.
During her marriage to Selim four years prior, Lobna says she faced years of horrific abuse, including savage beatings, and claims she was forced into hiding after he tried to kill her and her sisters.
She told The Sun: “Selim tried to kill me and my sisters many times.
“The last time, he would just turn up at random places; he would go stand outside my sister’s school.
“He would be messaging me, threatening me.
“He would say, ‘If you don’t come out of hiding, I’m going to go after your sisters’ – all these messages from him, but the last time he tried to kill me was right before I left.”
A string of threatening messages was the final straw for Lobna – and she says she was certain he would kill her if she didn’t leave.
In 2020, a terrified Lobna packed up her bags and moved into a new home in Cairo, Egypt, with their son, Zayn – hoping for a fresh start.
But six months later, Selim got in touch – insisting he wanted Lobna and Zayn back.
Confident that she had legal custody of their son, she agreed for Zayn’s grandad, Selim’s father, to spend a couple of hours with the five-year-old before returning him.
Waving goodbye, she had no idea it would be the last time she would see him for four agonising years.
She said: “We didn’t hear from him for months and then all of a sudden the grandad came and took him for dinner.
“His grandad came from America, saying I’d like to take him out for dinner and then bring him back before bedtime.
“I said, ‘Okay, no worries, bring him back’ I’d never had any reason not to trust him. He’s an old man.
“He took him, and his son actually kicked him out of the car, took Zayn and then drove off.
“His grandad had pretended to want to see him and then took him, with Zayn’s dad, and then switched off all the phones and texted me saying you won’t see him again.
“Then I didn’t see him for four years.”
Four-year battle
It would be the start of a mother’s tireless battle to reunite with her son, after she says she was failed by Egyptian authorities who denied multiple attempts to get him back through the courts.
Despite all her efforts to get her son back, in 2021, she was forced to flee to Belfast, where she had been raised as a child, after she says Selim waited outside her home for four days armed with a knife.
She explained: “He would hide outside our family’s house.
“He stood in the street for four days, without moving, without going to the toilet with a knife, and he was sitting in the car downstairs doing drugs, and it was horrible and thank god I never opened the window.
“I’d just seen him downstairs, and thank god, or else I’d have just not had any clue and just walked out of my building, and he would have grabbed me.
I was just sitting in Belfast in my house one night and I got a phone call saying your ex is in jail, they found these bodies with him, and honestly I didn’t believe it, I laughed it off
Lobna Yakout
“I had to escape after the fourth day. It was the scariest time of my life because I was just so scared.”
Lobna decided she had no choice but to leave the country to save her life, leaving her son behind with her ex-husband for Northern Ireland.
Thousands of miles from his mother, Zayn was cruelly told that his mum was dead, Lobna claims.
But her heartbreaking situation was about to get worse when she found out her husband was the so-called New Cairo Killer.
Serial killer ex
In 2024, four years after escaping her abusive marriage and still desperately trying to get her son back, Lobna was about to find out that the father of her son was also a notorious serial killer.
She says: “I was just sitting in Belfast in my house, and I got a phone call saying your ex is in jail, they found these bodies with him, and honestly, I didn’t believe it, I laughed it off.
“I thought initially my ex had fabricated this lie, so I could come back to Egypt.
“So I would fly out there, and he would just pop out of nowhere and take me. I left Egypt because he was trying to kill me.
“I thought this was a lie to try and get me to Egypt to feel safe, so he can just come and take me and kill me.
“I would never have guessed that he would do all the crimes that he did. I thought he just wanted to get me, only me, as payback for leaving him.”
She says that Zayn was born two years into their relationship after the pair met in a cafe in Alexandria, having had mutual friends.
She recalls: “There were no indications of him being like this at the start. Perhaps not to me, I was kind of blind to it, but to my sisters, they never really liked him. I never understood why until recently.
“The first signs were the violence, and then just not wanting to be home. His attitude started to change; he started to be very defensive, very distant.
“He got really abusive. It started off as emotional, and then it got physical. He would beat me up and kick me out of the house.”
Selim went on to torture and murder three women in his Cairo home between November 2023 and May 2024 – all while his son was in his care.
He is also believed to have created sick recordings before and after the killings and built a soundproof room to carry out his brutal crimes.
All the victims were thought to be sex workers, and he is alleged to have confessed to other killings.
Lobna says: “I left him because I could not stand him anymore and his actions, his psychotic-ness, he was just too much, he thought the world revolved around him basically.
“But I didn’t notice, honestly, any clues that he might be a serial killer. I thought I was just the target.
“And when I wasn’t the target, he would target my family, my sisters, to get me. I would never have guessed he would go and kill these young girls and cause all this chaos.
“To me, it’s still so crazy.”
Miracle reunion
With the news of Selim’s crimes, Lobna knew she had to get her son to safety, who was now living with Selim’s mother, his grandmother.
Having no contact with Zayn, Lobna set up a TikTok, which now has 211,000 followers, to plead for information on his whereabouts.
Months later, a hero follower, who requested not to be named, spotted Zayn and alerted Lobna, who flew immediately back to Egypt to track him down.
Miraculously, Lobna found her boy, now 10, after an agonising four years apart.
Lobna says: “It’s almost like we didn’t leave each other after all these years. It feels like we’ve never been apart.
“Zayn was taken from me and was told that I had left him and didn’t want him. He was told I was dead at some stage. He was told a lot of lies, but now he knows exactly what the truth is.
“I got a couple of lawyers, all the paperwork, everything was done from years ago but it was just the physical part I needed to do.
“I had to be here to get him myself because nobody is going to go beyond the paperwork, nobody cared enough to go and search for him like I did.
“So I made a TikTok, I went viral, and my videos got over 25million views. So that really did help me because one of my TikTok followers actually spotted Zayn a couple of weeks in a row. So that’s how I got him.
“Without going public on TikTok I would not have found him, no one would have recognised him,” she said.
She says Zayn was excluded from education and friends for years while he was living with his father.
“He spent one year with his grandparents and the rest with his dad,” she explains.
“His dad didn’t send him to school for a year before his grandmother took him, and then his grandmother didn’t send him to school for another year. So he missed school for two years and he’s 10.
“The dad just left him to do nothing.”
Without going public on TikTok I would not have found him, no one would have recognised him
Lobna Yakout
But she added that he’s in good spirits and the duo are doing well in a location she is unable to disclose.
She said: “Zayn is a very smart young boy.
“In the past five months, we have been working together and we have been working on a lot of the issues he had.
“He was told I was a bad person, told that I didn’t want him, he was told that I’d died for a while, so he was like, ‘I wish I hadn’t listened to anyone and I had found you earlier mum’, which is heartbreaking.
“I went through hell and back to a country that I’m not familiar with, where I didn’t know the language, I just understood most words, but when I talk everyone knows I’m foreign.
“Especially the big words they say in court, I’ve never heard this one before? I can’t read Arabic, so I went through a lot in the past few years.
“It’s more than I could imagine, but I got through it and I would love to help women and raise awareness for women because there are so many women who are going through this, so many I have met who are going through the same.
“That’s my goal right now to raise awareness and help people, to tell people about my journey because it’s not a normal journey, and anyone who needs help, I would love to be the one to help them.
“I have so many messages from women in the same situation telling me I have provided a positive for them, that maybe they are going to find their child.”
