Hardman’s kidnap threat while filming in Libyan desert
ROSS Kemp tells me he was held captive for 12 hours by a gun-toting tribe while filming his latest documentary in Libya. The former EastEnders hardman was left marooned inside a building while the clan – who wanted to kidnap him – surrounded it, brandishing firearms. He was filming in the desert city of Sabha, south of Tripoli , where he was looking into the country’s expansive smuggling and human trafficking network, and exploring violent extremism. In what he described as the “best” but “most dangerous” filming he has ever undertaken, he revealed: “At one point we were asked to leave the south. We had a number of people outside the building we were in with weapons. And the tribe that we were with had to defend us because this other clan wanted to take us.
“There was a stand-off for about 12 hours. We nearly had to be lifted out.”
Asked if he feared death he tells me: “You wouldn’t know it from our expressions but it certainly goes through your mind when you’ve got a family with guns right next to you and another with guns facing you.”
He also met migrants who were being illegally detained in detention camps by different militia. He said: “In the camps people are getting three pieces of cheese a day, one piece of bread and half a litre of dirty water. They are dying.
“We met a woman who had given birth three days before we arrived. Her baby had died six hours after she had gone into labour in the toilet. She was still bleeding and dying but no one was doing anything about it.
“There are three governments out there who say they are in control. But no one is in control in the country. It is on the verge of becoming a non-state.”
It’s not the first time the Bafta-winning documentary maker has had a close shave either.
Last year his documentary on Syria included shocking scenes of him dodging bullets from an ISIS sniper.
See Ross Kemp: Libya’s Migrant Hell on Sky 1 on February 21