KEMP HELD CAPTIVE BY LIBYA GANG
Kidnap bid on f ilming trip sparked 12hr stand-off
ROSS Kemp has spoken of how a gun-toting tribe kept him trapped for 12 hours while he filmed in Libya.
The EastEnders hardman was targeted for kidnap as he explored the war-torn country’s huge smuggling and human trafficking networks for a new documentary.
The armed clan surrounded a building his team was in at the desert city of Sabha – and a tense stand-off followed.
Kemp said: “We had a number of people outside the building we were in with weapons. And the tribe we were with had to defend us as this other clan wanted to take us. There was a stand-off for 12 hours. We nearly had to be lifted out.”
The star described his ordeal as the “best” but “most dangerous” filming he has done. Asked if he Twitter his family had banned him from m wearing tight swimwear.
Ex-fiancée actress Elizabeth Hurley ey joined in saying: “Your daughters are re planning to burn them.”
If they did that’s one lot of asheses Warney is keeping very quiet about. feared death, he said: “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.”
Kemp also met migrants who were being held illegally in detention camps by different militias.
He said: “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 died sixix hours after she had gone intoo labour in the toilet. She was s still bleeding and dying but no one was doing anything aboutbout it.
“There are threeree governments who say they are in control. But no onene is in control in the country.untry. It is on the verge rge of becoming a non-state.”
It was not the first time the BAFTA-winner has had a close shave. Last year, Kemp’s documentary on Syria included shocking scenes of him dodging bullets from an Islamic State sniper. He also secretly filmed ivory poachers for a documentary in Mozambique – admitting they would most likely have killed him had they discovered the cameras. But he said of his latest scrape: “This was far more dangerous than being somewhere like Iraq. “At l east there, we were embedded w with the Kurds. We knew the barriers of where we were safe at any one time. “But ini Libya, you are not safe at all. It’s a country where t there are three guns to every one person.” The documentary Ross Kem Kemp: Libya’s Migrant He Hell is on Sky 1 on F February 21.