Nigerian gang killed UK hostage who sang Amazing Grace
Held hostage in a Nigerian swamp, missionaries David and Shirley Donovan witnessed their colleague’s killing
AN optician kidnapped in Nigeria was shot dead after trying to cheer his fellow hostages by playing Amazing Grace on his guitar, two of his fellow missionaries have told The Daily Telegraph.
Ian Squire, 57, was killed by a salvo of shots fired by one of the gunmen who abducted the four-strong British missionary team from their clinic in the southern Delta region on Oct 13.
Details of how Mr Squire died had not previously been made public, and it had earlier been reported that he had died of an asthma attack. However, an interview with The Telegraph, his fellow hostages David and Shirley Donovan say he was killed the morning after they were abducted by the gang, who hid them in a bamboo hut in a swamp.
Mr Donovan, a former GP, and his wife Shirley, a former teacher, who were freed three weeks later, paid tribute to Mr Squire, an optician from Shepperton, Surrey, who ran his own Christian eyesight charity, Mission for Vision. “Ian was a man of faith, humour, music and invention,” Mr Donovan said.
STUCK in a kidnap gang’s hideout in Nigeria’s lawless Delta area, missionaries David and Shirley Donovan and their two companions were trying their best to keep up morale. The night before, they had been dragged from their beds by men armed with AK-47S, who had burst into their lodgings near the Donovans’ bush clinic. Ignoring their pleas that they were missionary medics, not wealthy oil workers, the gang whisked them by speedboat to a shack on stilts in a remote swamp.
Then, as the kidnappers unexpectedly handed back a few of their looted belongings, the captives saw a chance to raise their spirits.
Among the items returned to them was an acoustic guitar belonging to fellow missionary Ian Squire, the clinic’s resident optician. Sitting himself on the shack’s broken TV set, he duly launched into Amazing Grace.
It was, as it happened, the only song Mr Squire, 57, could play without recourse to his music sheets. But it chimed with the occasion. Written by John Newton, an 18th-century slave trader-turned-preacher, it tells how a brush with death caused him to find faith in God and forsake his old profession selling human cargo.
For the Donovans, it was a reminder of how their own religious awakening had brought them to Nigeria in the first place. And with the gang after a 1 billion Naira (£2million) ransom, it also underscored how in this part of West Africa, men and women have long been traded for money.
“It was the perfect song, and at that point things began to look not quite as bad,” said Dr Donovan, 57, in an interview with his wife last week at their Cambridgeshire home.
“But then, after Ian finished playing, he stood up, and a salvo of gunshots killed him instantly. We didn’t see who did it, but it was obvious that someone in the gang had shot him. It was terrifying to see.
“We jumped out of the shack and into the water as we thought they were coming for us next, but a member of the gang came and put us back in there with Ian for the rest of the day.”
Just why their companion had been killed, the gang refused to say. Mr Donovan speculates that one gunman had panicked, fearing the sound of the music drifting across the water would give away the foreigners’ presence.
Given that the gang spent much of their time drunk and high on marijuana and cocaine, a degree of paranoid trigger-happiness would not be surprising, although whether the gunman intended to kill or simply fire warning shots may never be known.
Whatever the answer, it was a horrifying start to the missionaries’ threeweek ordeal, during which they lived as much in fear of dying from malaria or dysentery as of death at the hands of their kidnappers.
Yet before relating the story of how they survived, the Donovans are keen to answer the question they know many will ask. Namely, what on earth were white British missionaries doing in one of Nigeria’s most dangerous corners in the first place? After all, practising Christians are a rare enough sight. But practising Christian missionaries? In 21st century, post-colonial Africa?
Certainly, talking over their kitchen table, the Donovans come across not like patrician Victorian throwbacks, but as an ordinary, well-educated middle-class couple. Which, indeed, was what they used to be. Dr Donovan, 57, worked as a GP in Cambridge. His Scot- tish wife, 58, taught local children excluded from school.
But from their early 40s onwards, what had previously been just a “nominal” faith began to play a more central role in their lives.
“We had good jobs, our two sons in private schools, and a big house in Cambridge, and pretty much everything we wanted,” said Mr Donovan. “But we realised it didn’t satisfy us, and that to be true to the Gospel, we had to realign our lives.”
While there was no particular moment of epiphany, the “realignment” was certainly radical. In 2003, they sold their house for a smaller one, moved their children to a state school, and used the proceeds to start a medical charity, New Foundations. “The children were fine as they wanted to move schools anyway, but our friends did think we were completely crazy,” Mrs Donovan admits.
That, though, was the easy part. In response to a talk they heard by a Nigerian pastor about infant mortality in the Delta region, they eventually set up a clinic in Enekorogha, a Delta community poor even by local standards. There was no electricity, clean water or roads. Access was only possible via a three-hour motorboat ride through labyrinthine, mosquito-infested creeks.
It was also on a Foreign Office no-golist, as it was plagued by robbers, pirates and militants. Early on, two of the £4,000 motorboats the Donovans had bought were stolen, the thieves stabbing their watchman on one occasion. Mrs Donovan suffered a potentially fatal bout of cerebral malaria, and in 2009, Mr Donovan was nearly kidnapped for a first time. Locals rallied to his protection, concealing him and a colleague in a priest hole-style hidingplace underneath a sofa in a neighbour’s house.
The fact that locals looked after them, the couple say, was partly due to the healthcare they were providing, and partly due to their low-key approach. Rather than running the clinic entirely themselves, they trained locals to do the job too, and otherwise kept out of village affairs, but visiting as often as they could. “A lot of people have issues about Western missionaries and rightly so if they try to impose Western values,” Mrdonovan said.
But they also admit that had it not been for their faith, they would have given up early on. Their reward came one day when the gravedigger at Enekorogha children’s cemetery told them that thanks to their clinic, he was almost out of a job.
Even the locals, though, lived in fear of the “Egbesu Boys”, a cult-like gang named after an ancient war god in local Ijaw tribal culture. Driven underground in Victorian times – when Brit-
‘After Ian finished playing, he stood up, and a salvo of gunshots killed him instantly. We didn’t see who did it, but it was obvious that someone in the gang had shot him. It was terrifying to see’
ish missionaries first helped colonise southern Nigeria – the Egbesu cult has been revived by militants and criminal gangs, who believe its ritual scarring practices make them bulletproof. It was an Egbesu faction that abducted the Donovans and their friends on Oct 13, led by a ferocious, bearded commander known as the “General”.
“At times you could see ... their body markings,” said Mrs Donovan. “We’d never heard of Egbesu before, but it added a sinister element to proceedings.”
After Mr Squire’s death, the group were moved to another stilted shack, a cramped 16ft by 10ft building. The gang, who dined off roasted monitor lizard, brought noodles and clean water for the missionaries.
Ablutions, though, had to be performed by leaning out of the shack and into the surrounding water. They shared their accommodation with up to 14 gang members, who spent much of their time playing violent videos and loud, sexually suggestive rap music on their mobiles.
Both Mrs Donovan and her fellow female missionary, Alanna Carson from Fife, feared sexual assault, “but thankfully the gang leader told his men that if they so much as touched the women, he would kill them personally”, said Dr Donovan. At one point, the “General” lashed an underling 50 times across his bare buttocks for falling asleep on guard duty.
The guards were overheard talking about selling the hostages to Boko Haram, the northern Nigerian Islamist group. While that seemed unlikely, as Boko Haram are despised in Christian southern Nigeria, Mrs Donovan said that “as Christian missionaries our blood ran cold at that point”.
The captives kept their spirits up by reading a Bible that the kidnappers had stolen in a robbery – including the First Epistle of St Paul to Timothy, which refers to the evils of “menstealers” (kidnappers and slave traders). As time went on, they also used the Bible to build a rapport with their guards.
“They justified their actions by saying that they’d grown up with nothing, and that we were privileged, but we pointed out that some of our own clinic workers had also come from troubled backgrounds,” said Dr Donovan, who also offered his captors medical help. “There was a bit of a silence about that at first, but by the end two of them were asking for lessons on the Bible.”
Mrs Donovan added: “We told them about one of our clinic workers, Jerusalem, who had been a troubled man but had become a Christian and a transformed character. He’d been trained by Ian and could even do the maths for lens refraction. Then one of the guards said ‘stop this conversation now’. I said ‘why?’. He said ‘because you are speaking to my soul’. Jerusalem could have been one of them.”
At other times, the hostages distracted themselves by improvising a version of The Unbelievable Truth, the BBC Radio 4 quiz show where guests must tell fact from fiction. They also talked about their lives at home.
“Alanna would talk about her life at Specsavers in Fife, about how she’d buy a bun at Greggs en route to work,” said Mrs Donovan. “It was prosaic but comforting, as it reminded us of home. We’d also think of what it might be like to eat a lasagne or open a Diet Coke.”
One enduring worry was their health. After days in the shack with the kidnappers, the water around them became a “faecal soup” of human waste and remains of monitor lizard thrown away by the camp cook, who himself had dysentery. The hostages were given a mosquito net, but were bitten numerous times and had no prophylactics. “They didn’t understand that if we got ill, we’d die,” Dr Donovan said.
The other main concern was how they would ever pay a ransom. The Donovans had no kidnap and ransom insurance, having been told when they first went out to Nigeria that premiums would cost £1,000 per week. Dr Donovan braced himself for having to call his brother and ask him to liquidise what was left of the family’s assets in Britain, only to realise that the “General” had no idea how to organise international ransom transactions anyway.
The captives saw military gunboats looking for them, although they were mindful of how a previous attempt to free a British hostage in Nigeria had ended in tragedy. Chris Mcmanus, who was abducted by an Islamist group, was shot dead by his captors during a raid to free him by British special forces and Nigerian troops in 2012.
Instead, the hostages were eventually freed after the kidnappers told them a ransom from the Nigerian government had been paid. The gang blindfolded them and dropped them at a rendezvous where two SUVS were waiting with a Nigerian army escort. “We got inside and smelt the leather and the AC,” said Dr Donovan. “It was like stepping from one world to another.”
Today, the Donovans’ phone still rings regularly with well-wishers from Enekorogha, who turned out in their hundreds earlier this month for a mourning parade in Ian’s memory.
In a more lasting tribute, a local child born during the missionaries’ captivity was named “Ian” in his honour – as have two others since they were freed.
“It is not a name you hear often in Nigeria – they have trouble even pronouncing the name, and normally say ‘Tian’ instead,” said Mrs Donovan. “Ian will be remembered very warmly.”
Dr Donovan added: “Ian was hungry to know more of God and lived his life with that purpose. He wasn’t afraid of going anywhere, including being in the Delta. As well as his expertise as an optician, he also brought a sense of fun – the people loved and appreciated him.”