I like your breakdown of events, but Dominique was Sharma's daughter, not Shamji's. It does seem very likely that he was caught one way or another and took a dive to try and make it out alive
For Dave Sharma's daughter to be named Dominique Sharma Clarke, it sounds like she was married...?
> I spoke to Ismailova recently, and she told me that she’d known Zac by yet another fictitious name, Thaimas, and that she’d believed him to be a young Kazakh who lived by himself.
A white Londoner is not capable of passing for a Kazakh.
A fairly large fraction of Kazakhstan's population is ethnic Russian.
Common for children of unmarried parents as well
Ever heard of Borat? /s
I think they implied ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan, like Arkady Volozh (the founder of Yandex) or Vladimir Zhirinovsky (the proto-Putin of the 90s).
They should be called Kazakhstani (the nationality), not Kazakh (as in the ethnic group), but this is the New Yorker, so pathos tends to matter more than logos.