Lindhout testifies about abduction
TRIAL HEARS TESTIMONY ABOUT WOMAN’S FIFTEEN MONTHS OF CAPTIVITY IN SOMALIA
OTTAWA An emotional Amanda Lindhout recounted the horrors of being kidnapped at gunpoint in Somalia as the trial of one of her alleged hostage-takers got underway.
Lindhout sobbed Thursday upon approaching the witness box to describe her abduction by a gang of armed, masked men nine years ago, the beginning of what she called 460 days of hell.
Lindhout, a freelance journalist from Red Deer, and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan were seized near Mogadishu in August 2008 while working on a story. Both were released in November 2009 in exchange for a ransom payment.
Ali Omar Ader, a 40-year-old Somalian national, has pleaded not guilty to a criminal charge of hostage-taking for his alleged role as a negotiator.
He was arrested by the RCMP in Ottawa in June 2015. It emerged during pre-trial motions last spring that the Mounties had lured
Basically they saw me as a piece of property that they owned.
Ader to Canada through an elaborate scheme to sign a purported book publishing deal.
The Crown says Ader admitted to undercover investigators on two occasions that he was the negotiator in the kidnapping and that he was paid $10,000.
Ader sat in the prisoner’s box just metres away from Lindhout as she struggled to gain her composure with the help of a support person who sat beside her during the proceedings.
The Crown alleges Ader was known to the hostages as “Adam” and took part in several telephone calls with Lindhout’s mother to demand payment for her daughter’s release.
Lindhout, 36, told of being introduced to Adam, who was also called “the commander.”
He said Allah had put it into his heart to ask for a ransom for the two journalists, Lindhout told the court.
Her mother was earning minimum wage working at a bakery, and her father was on long-term disability. In addition, Canada has a policy of not paying ransoms, prompting Lindhout to tell her captors they might as well kill her now.
Lindhout said Adam asked her: “Are you ready to die?”
A phone message was left for her father demanding $2.5 million.
Trevor Brown, an Ottawa lawyer representing Ader, cross-examined Lindhout with a line of questioning that suggested Adam was not a heavily armed hardcore militant, but an amateur who wore a polo shirt and glasses.
Brown referred to past statements Lindhout had supposedly made about the initial meeting with Adam: that he was so dramatic that it was almost comical.
Lindhout disagreed with the characterization of her remarks, telling the court Adam’s question about being “ready to die” had a surreal quality to it that would almost have been comical if it weren’t so serious. “It made it all the more real and scary.”
At one point, Adam told Lindhout he wanted to marry her — a prospect she found terrifying, she testified. Others also mentioned marriage. “Basically they saw me as a piece of property that they owned.”
Lindhout testified she was repeatedly sexually assaulted and beaten while captive. She was moved frequently, spending time in about a dozen different places, often in filthy conditions. In one, rats were “crawling all over my body,” she told the court.
Brennan, 45, recounted how he and Lindhout managed to escape briefly five months into their ordeal. They sought sanctuary in a nearby mosque but were swiftly recaptured and kept shackled for the remainder of their captivity.
In one house, the two were kept in separate rooms, but found ways to communicate by knocking on the wall and leaving clandestine notes in the bathroom “to bolster each other’s spirits,” he told the court.
Lindhout said that after a year they were not eating regularly, had only dirty water to drink and were “really sick all the time.”
In 2009, Lindhout established the Global Enrichment Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering leadership in Somalia through educational and community-based programs.
Amanda Lindhout was nothing less than magnificent. She may have been weeping as she entered the courtroom Thursday, leaning hard against the handsome man at her side, sometimes almost crumbling.
But her spirit was as brave as her bright red dress and her high heels, and she kept moving to the witness box.
You don’t survive 15 months of captivity in Somalia, days of humiliation and terror and deprivation, nights of physical and sexual abuse, without iron in your spine.
There is iron in her spine.
At first, it seemed as though she wouldn’t be able to start, and the court was ready to accommodate her if it came to that, allow her to testify by video from an adjacent room. Then she took some big breaths.
Several times, she put a hand to her heart, as if to still it; occasionally, so did the man at her side, a friend who was allowed to be there as her support person.
Lindhout was a young freelance journalist when in August of 2008, with an Australian colleague named Nigel Brennan, she was taken prisoner by a gang of armed bandits outside Mogadishu.
She and Brennan, respectively now 36 and 45, were held in ghastly conditions, subjected to cruelties huge and small, for 460 days before being freed after their families paid about $600,000 in ransom through a private security company.
After a failed escape, they spent the final almost 11 months of their captivity in makeshift shackles, Lindhout confined to a thin mat.
She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder; it is a miracle she wasn’t flat-out broken.
At one point, she said to herself, “OK.” Then she began to answer prosecutor Croft Michaelson’s questions, both of them speaking slowly so the Somali translators could do their work for the accused, Ali Omar Ader, the Somali man in the prisoner’s box.
Ader, now 40, is pleading not guilty to hostagetaking. He is alleged to have been the negotiator for Lindhout’s kidnappers, and thus a party to the offence.
He was known to Lindhout and Brennan as “Adam.”
He was lured to Canada by an RCMP officer who pretended to be a book agent.
Ader’s defence team is not disputing that the voice on the recordings of various ransom phone calls, most made to Lindhout’s mother, is Ader’s.
Several times in her evidence, Lindhout could not take her eyes off Adam/ Ader; a couple of times, the prosecutor had to repeat his question, so lost was she in looking at him.
It seemed to make her stronger.
Certainly, she only grew stronger, and pretty quickly, she had her groove back, her answers accompanied by a wry smile, such as when she told Michaelson how she and Brennan had nicknamed the older man, named YaYa, “The Skids,” and the money man as “Donald Trump.”
She said that the day she was taken hostage, Adam was introduced as “the commander,” though she figured out pretty quickly that he was really “the comms guy,” the one in charge of ransom demands and phone calls.
He asked the name of her “village;” she told him “Red Deer, Alberta.” Then he came back, and there was that crooked grin, “and told us Allah had put it into his heart to ask for a ransom for us, and it wasn’t a ‘program’ (a Somali term for an official plan) yet.”
Later, Adam told her and Brennan the families would have 24 hours to pay.
She told him, she said, that her folks had no money — her mother worked in a bakery for minimum wage, her dad was on long-term disability — and said, “You may as well kill me now.”
“He looked me right in the eye and asked, ‘Are you ready to die?’ ”
Later, when defence lawyer Trevor Brown was questioning her, he suggested Adam had been so dramatic, she found it almost comical.
No, she said. He spoke coldly, and though she once used the word comical to police, what she meant was it had a surreal quality to it.
Adam/Ader is not alleged to have raped her. He was not among those who once hog-tied Lindhout — hands bound to her ankles, blindfolded, a sock as a gag — for days. He isn’t alleged to have physically beaten her. He wasn’t one of those administering daily threats and using her as a dirty Western woman. He was a peripheral player, but he was there on the same day the pair was abducted at gunpoint, there for one of the forced videos, but mostly a terrifying voice on the phone to her mother.
It was during the making of that video — the masked, armed-to-the-teeth teenage thugs arranged around Lindhout and Brennan — that Adam/Ader said something like, “Don’t be scared” and told her the boys had their guns out to scare the Canadian government.
Trevor Brown suggested his client had been trying to be nice about it, and that Lindhout acknowledged this in a December, 2009, statement to police.
“You’ll have to show me,” she said, “where in there I say Adam’s trying to be nice.”
Brown showed her, and Lindhout read the passage to herself and laughed out loud: “It all becomes pretty relative when you’re a hostage,” she said with her wonderful grin. “They’re all quite nice to you in the beginning.”
Then court broke for lunch.
I hope she was in the room long enough to hear the tinkle of Adam/Ader’s shackles as guards led him away.
She finished testifying shortly after court resumed, and wept again, whimpering a few minutes in her friend’s arms.
But when she came out of the courtroom, Amanda Lindhout’s head was high, and she was gorgeous in her red dress.
HE LOOKED ME RIGHT IN THE EYE AND ASKED, ‘ARE YOU READY TO DIE?’