Lindhout’s moment of truth
Kidnapped journalist speaks out after suspect’s arrest: ‘He is a dangerous man’
Amanda Lindhout was so anxious about a scheduled call with her National Security contact that she forgot to eat dinner.
It was 8 pm MT last Thursday night — the eve of her 34th birthday — and Lindhout had just returned home to Canmore, Alta., from a string of speaking engagements for her bestselling memoir, A House in the Sky, which chronicles the 460 days she spent being starved, beaten, sexually assaulted and held for ransom in Somalia.
She knew the caller would bear important news, namely whether a Crown prosecutor felt there was enough evidence to charge the man who led the negotiations on her capture, who terrorized her mother for months with phone calls demanding money and who had been the subject of a lengthy, covert RCMP investigation.
Lindhout prepared herself for the worst; that the investigation would be closed and it would all be put to rest. In what turned out to be a conference call with more RCMP officials than she could count, she learned the opposite was true.
“It never crossed my mind that they had already arrested the guy,” she told the National Post in an interview Sunday. Lindhout said she fell to her knees and sobbed while sputtering ‘thank yous’ as the panel of officials and investigators waited on the other line.
“I could hear some of their emotion in the room, too,” she said. “It was a moment, I think, for all of us.”
Though she had participated in the investigation for more than five and a half years, the freelance journalist-turned-philanthropist never shared the RCMP’s confidence that Ali Omar Ader would be charged in connection with her kidnapping in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Aug. 23, 2008 when she entered the country with photojournalist Nigel Brennan in pursuit of a story.
Ader allegedly played a leadership role in her captivity, constantly on the phone with Lindhout’s mother, Lorinda Stewart, and at one point ordering Lindhout be severely beaten when Stewart couldn’t meet his financial demands. He would only occasionally come by the house where she was kept captive, and referred to the boys who raped and beat her as “the gang.”
As she wrote in A House in the Sky, the man she knew then as “Adam” didn’t seem terribly concerned about being caught.
“And obviously he wasn’t, right?” she said Sunday. “He had the audacity to travel to Canada after being involved in a high-profile kidnapping case with a Canadian citizen.”
Lindhout said she played no part in Ader’s arrival in Ottawa and could not share specifics about her involvement.
But now she faces the prospect of testifying at his trial and of all the phone conversations between Ader and Stewart — “terrible audio recordings of when I was beaten” — being filed as evidence in public court.
“That’s scary for me,” she said. “But it’s also my reality.”
Lindhout also views her healing from the 15 months of torture and captivity as separate from the arrest made Thursday.
“And yet it’s a very strong and powerful thing I think will, in many ways, aid in my healing journey,” she said. “I will support it, but I don’t need it in my motivation for wanting to testify in the trial, which I will do given the opportunity…. I just feel like I would participate because it is also the right thing to do.
“He is a dangerous man, he deserves to be in prison and I support the due process that will take him there.”
Lindhout would also welcome the opportunity to sit face to face with him “to really just let him know the ways his decisions really impacted me and hurt me.”
It would be powerful, she said, to “sit there and (for him to) be in my presence as an empowered woman who wasn’t broken by that circumstance, to sit in front of him where he is now going to jail for potentially the rest of his life.”
It was particularly tough to see her captor’s face once again, Lindhout said. She asked the RCMP to send the photo to her Thursday evening, but they couldn’t do so until he had been formally charged.
By then, it was Friday morning — the morning of her birthday — and she saw it blaring from every news website, nestled on her Facebook news feed among her many birthday wishes. It was, she said, “deeply upsetting.”
“It took my breath away in the moment I saw him,” she said. “It immediately brought me back to Somalia and to those dark days there.”
It was particularly hard for her mother. Since 2008, Ader had been a terrifying voice on the other end of a crackling phone line from Mogadishu, threatening to harm her daughter if her family couldn’t pay ransom.
“She’d never seen him before, he’d only been a voice on the phone,” she said. “And she was very emotional when she saw the picture of him because she said it became very real.”
Shortly after that phone call Thursday night, Lindhout and her mother had fallen into one another’s arms, crying. Stewart had made the three-minute trip to her daughter’s home and they just talked through tears about a development they hadn’t been sure would ever take place.
They spent this weekend quietly together, celebrating not just Lindhout’s birthday, but her mother’s as well — Stewart’s birthday is June 13.
“Imagine f or me, t his thing’s been dragging on for all these years, so it’s like, ‘Really, is this ever going to happen?’ ” Lindhout said. “I wasn’t hung up on whether or not it would happen. It’s not like something I was thinking about every day of my life. It was like, ‘Yeah let’s see.’
“They actually did it.”