A Security Company Cashed In on America’s Wars—And Then Disappeared
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Man Bahadur Thapa had his doubts about the safety of the travel arrangements. Taliban spies were everywhere in the Afghan capital, and the bus transporting him and the Canadian embassy’s other guards, all Nepalese and Indian, was unarmored. But Thapa was used to pushing worries to the back of his mind. After all, he thought, the British company he worked for was trustworthy. So, as he did nearly every day, the 50-year-old boarded a yellow and white minibus and rode through the Kabul dawn to his shift.
Thapa’s memory of that day—June 20, 2016—stops about two minutes into the journey. He woke up 13 days later in the hospital, his body riven with shrapnel. A bomb had ripped through the bus, killing 13 of his fellow Nepalese and two Indians.
His family had seen the blast on the news, but didn’t find out he was wounded until a doctor treating him thought to pick up his patient’s phone. As Thapa lay in a hospital bed, his son-in-law, who speaks English, emailed the guard’s employers, a well-established company called Sabre International Security, with urgent questions: How would the critical surgery Thapa needed be paid for? What would happen to him afterward, given that he clearly wouldn’t be able to work for a long time? Apart from one brush-off email, no one responded. That might have been the last that anyone in the West heard of the guards’ plight if a Nepali labor-rights expert helping the families hadn’t asked an American lawyer he knew to take a look at the case.
Matthew Handley specializes in getting compensation for vulnerable workers in war zones, and has taken on military-contracting giants like the company formerly known as KBR Halliburton. This case, however, was different: When Handley Googled Sabre, he couldn't even find a company website. There seemed to be no way of getting in touch with anyone.
“It was one of the most extreme examples of a company and all indicators of its presence just really disappearing,” he told .
