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THE sister of Isis kidnap victim Rachel Saunders never stopped hoping that she would be found alive – even though police told her over three months ago they were searching for her body, which was positively identified last week.

“Before this I kept on thinking, well maybe Rachel is still alive, even though I knew she couldn’t possibly be,” said her older sister Judith Buchanan, 73, a Howick gun dog trainer.

“The police found so much blood in their car they said she couldn’t possibly be alive. But in my head there was still hope.

“I suppose that’s just human nature. You hope for some miracle. Well, in this case there wasn’t a miracle. There was hope, but now there is none.”

The disbelief that has permeated the last few months of Buchanan’s life began when the Hawks dropped the bombshell that British botanists Rachel, 63, and husband Rod Saunders, 74, had been abducted by Isislinked suspects on February 10 in Ngoye Forest Reserve near Mtunzini, 130km north of Durban.

“When I first heard that they had been kidnapped I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘come on, someone is playing a horrible practical joke. People like them don’t just get kidnapped.’ Then gradually you realise that it’s actually true.”

That is when Buchanan’s hope began to fade.

“I started to lose hope when the ransom demand didn’t come and we never heard anything, day after day. That’s when I thought, ‘they’re dead… unless they’ve been dumped somewhere.’ For a while I had these awful visions of Rod and Rachel wandering around the forest hurt and unable to find their way out.”

The day before their kidnapping, the Cape Town-based botanists who own the indigenous seed supplier Silverhill Seeds had just wrapped-up shooting in the Drakensberg Mountains with award-winning BBC Gardener’s World host Nick Bailey.

On the strong recommendation of a film crew member they visited the rich biodiversity of Ngoye Forest and unwittingly stumbled into a warped and horrific plot: “There is an elderly couple in the forest, that it is a ‘good hunt’,” is one of the incriminating messages that has since come to light in court.

According to a damning Hawks affidavit this message and others reveal how an innocent botanical exploration in Ngoye morphed into an Isis motivated hunt, abduction and assassination.

Chillingly, another text sent by the couple’s stalker read: “When the brothers in Kenya go out and do this work it’s very important that the body of the victim is never found and it remains a missing person case.”

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Buchanan, still perplexed by the kidnapping’s evil and diabolical synchronicity.

“That’s all you can say. You can’t say anything else. It wasn’t as if Rod and Rachel were lured there. It just happened they drove into that forest and that stupid man saw them and decided to take them out. It was nothing more than sheer chance.”

The irony is that when tragedy struck Rachel was being Rachel, said Buchanan. “Always cheerful, loving life and living it to the full all over the place.

“But if it’s meant to be it’s meant to be and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it – and that has fundamentally changed her life.”

Buchanan praised the Hawks who worked tirelessly to secure the arrest, a mere five days after the abduction, of Isis-linked suspects Sayfydeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and his wife Fatima Patel, 27.

“The Hawks were brilliant,” she said. “Dedicated, committed and very compassionate. When I met the Hawks investigating officer on my birthday on March 14, which wasn’t the nicest thing to do, I was very impressed with his attitude. He said they’d look for Rod and

It’s not going to help if I’m angry with them. They’re not worth it

Rachel until they found them. Which they’ve done and more.”

Patel and Del Vecchio’s home phones and cellphones yielded incriminating evidence about the couple’s demise but not the whereabouts of their bodies. Neither did the arrest of a third suspect, Thembamandla Xulu, 19, for possession of the Saunders’ cellphones.

That information came to light in late March when an intensive manhunt finally nailed the Hawks’ much-wanted fourth suspect, Malawian Ahmad Jackson Mussa (aka Bazooka) in Durban North.

He alleged that after the murders he and Patel rendezvoused with Del Vecchio driving the Saunders’ white Toyota Landcruiser, found abandoned on February 18 in Waterloo