Onijah Andrew Robinson.
Credit: X/@saeedmalik3000
In an unusual love story that has grabbed headlines, a US woman travelled all the way from her country to Pakistan's Karachi in order to meet her 19-year-old 'lover' Nidal Ahmed Memon, whom she claimed to have met online. As fate would have it, this was just the start of what turned out to be a bizarre tale of love and rejection, which had a rather unfortunate conclusion to it.
Onijah Andrew Robinson, aged 33, arrived in Karachi in October 24, to meet Memon and take their 'relationship' to the next level. However, 19-year-old Memon abandoned Robinson, claiming that his family would never agree to their marriage, leaving her stranded in Pakistan with an expired tourist visa and no one as support.
Looking for answers, Robinson decided to camp outside Memon's house in Karachi, when, to her dismay, she discovered that it was locked and abandoned.
Robinson's story came into the limelight when Pakistani activist and YouTuber Zaffar Abbas shared it on social media, following which Sindh Governor Kamran Khan Tessori stepped in to extend her expired visa and arranged a ticket back home for her.
Things got even stranger from this point on. Despite Governor Tessori coming to her aid, Robinson refused to leave Memon's residence and instead made strange demands.
While encamped outside of his house, Robinson asked for Memon to pay her $3,000 a week (nearly PKR 9 lakh) and demanded that she become a citizen of Pakistan.
"It has been months now that she has staged a sit-in in the parking lot of the same building her lover used to stay in. NGOs and authorities have offered to arrange her air ticket to the US but she insists on staying back. Instead, she is now demanding $3,000 per week along with a Pakistani citizenship," a local resident said, as per daijiworld.com.
Jeremiah Andrew Robinson, the woman's son, however, has claimed that his mother suffers from "mental health issues like bipolar disorder, which have affected her cognitive abilities," according to a Dialogue Pakistan report. Onijah Robinson is currently admitted to the psychiatry department at Karachi's Jinnah Post Graduate Hospital for a mental health examination, as per the outlet.