The Chilling Texts That Revealed Everything — How An Afghan Migrant Tried To Frame A Murder As A Religious Attack 😮🔍
An Afghan migrant accused of murdering a British woman in Athens allegedly tried to cover his tracks by texting his wife from a burner phone while posing as a jihadist. The messages claimed the killing was carried out because of the victim’s Christian faith, according to reports emerging from the Greek investigation.
Sharif Ahmadzai, 26, is charged with the murder of Elisabeth-Jane Ross, a 38-year-old Scottish woman whose body was discovered stuffed inside a suitcase in an abandoned building in the Kypseli district of Athens on 18 July. She had been missing since 15 July. Greek authorities say Ahmadzai has admitted dumping the body and stealing her bank cards, but he denies killing her, claiming she was already dead when he arrived at her apartment.
The alleged burner-phone messages form a particularly disturbing element of the case. After the killing, investigators say, Ahmadzai contacted Elisabeth’s friends and family from her own device before switching it off. He then obtained a second phone and began sending messages to his wife, Alaina Hall, as well as to Elisabeth’s contacts and even to himself. In those texts he is alleged to have adopted the persona of an unnamed jihadist who had murdered the Scottish woman because she was attempting to convert people to Christianity. The messages appear designed to create a false trail and divert suspicion away from him.
Ahmadzai’s background adds further complexity to the story. He fled Afghanistan in 2016 after, he has said, his entire family was wiped out by the Taliban. He paid smugglers in an attempt to reach Britain, travelling through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey before settling in Greece. In 2017 he converted to Christianity. He later met Alaina Hall, an American woman from Georgia, and the couple married in 2023. They have a young child together.
Elisabeth Ross had come to Athens to volunteer with a refugee charity. She met Ahmadzai and his wife through that work. The flat she was staying in was provided by the same NGO, and Ahmadzai reportedly had a key. According to testimony from Alaina Hall, she woke in the early hours of 15 July to find her husband missing. Using a location-tracking app she saw that his phone placed him at Elisabeth’s apartment. That detail, combined with other evidence, became central to the police inquiry.
CCTV footage has proved equally significant. Cameras captured a man matching Ahmadzai’s description wheeling a black suitcase through the streets of Athens on 16 July. The same man was wearing shorts identical to those Ahmadzai had posted in an Instagram selfie months earlier. The suitcase was later found to contain Elisabeth’s body in a derelict building opposite the Panellinios Boxing Club, the gym where Ahmadzai trained as a boxer.
Alaina Hall’s cooperation with investigators appears to have been decisive. Beyond the location data, she grew suspicious when her husband presented her with expensive gifts shortly after Elisabeth’s disappearance: 2,550 euros in cash and a new iPhone 17 Pro. She feared the items might have been bought with the victim’s stolen bank cards and raised her concerns with police. Her evidence helped piece together Ahmadzai’s movements on the night of 15 July and in the days that followed.
Greek police sources have indicated that while Ahmadzai has confessed to disposing of the body, he continues to maintain that Elisabeth was already dead when he entered the apartment. Investigators are examining whether the killing may have been motivated by a rejected romantic advance. Former Athens police union official George Kalliakmanis has publicly noted that Ahmadzai went to the flat “for a reason” and that nothing can yet be ruled out, including the possibility that Elisabeth rejected him.
Elisabeth’s friends and former colleagues have described her as a woman driven by an intense desire to help others. Senior pastors from Destiny Church in Edinburgh, where she had been involved, issued a statement praising her “unstoppable passion to help those less fortunate.” They noted that this sense of calling sometimes took her to difficult and challenging places, adding that she was determined not to leave the world the same way she found it. Tributes have emphasised her kindness, her commitment to refugee work and the shock felt by those who knew her.
The discovery of the body by a homeless man in the derelict building brought the case into the public eye. What followed was a rapid investigation that combined digital evidence, CCTV, witness statements and the testimony of Ahmadzai’s own wife. The alleged use of a burner phone to send fabricated jihadist messages represents an unusually elaborate attempt at misdirection. If proven, it suggests a calculated effort not only to dispose of the body but to construct an entirely false narrative around the motive for the killing.
Ahmadzai now faces charges of murder, robbery and illegal possession of a weapon. He is due to appear before a judge in Athens. Prosecutors will seek to demonstrate that the sequence of events — the visit to the apartment, the disposal of the body in a suitcase, the theft of bank cards, the purchase of gifts, and the sending of the burner-phone messages — forms a coherent and damning picture.
For Elisabeth’s family and friends the details emerging from the investigation only deepen the sense of loss. A woman who travelled to Greece to support refugees ended her life in the most brutal circumstances, her body concealed in a suitcase and left in an abandoned building. The alleged attempt by her accused killer to frame the crime as a religiously motivated attack by a jihadist adds a layer of calculated cruelty to an already horrific case.
As the legal process moves forward, Greek authorities continue to gather and test evidence. The burner-phone messages, the CCTV footage, the location data and the testimony of Alaina Hall will all be scrutinised in court. At the centre of the case remains the question of what exactly happened inside Elisabeth Ross’s apartment on the night of 15 July, and why a man who had presented himself as a fellow convert and charity volunteer is now accused of her murder.
The investigation has already revealed a complex web of relationships, movements and digital communications. Whether the jihadist texts were a genuine attempt to create a false motive or part of a wider pattern of deception will be for the courts to determine. What is already clear is that the death of Elisabeth-Jane Ross has exposed a dark and carefully constructed cover story that investigators are now systematically dismantling.