Canadian reveals details of Somalia hostage ordeal
Amanda Lindhout’s new book tells the harrowing story of her kidnapping, and the abuse she suffered at the hands of her abductors in Somalia, writes CHRIS PURDY.
After about a year of being starved, beaten and sexually brutalized, Amanda Lindhout decided it was time to kill herself.
The Alberta woman, taken hostage in Somalia in August 2008, says she reached her breaking point after spending three days trussed up like an animal, her hands and feet pulled so tightly behind her back that she could barely breathe.
When her captors did untie her, they told her it was only a reprieve. They promised to use the same torture technique on her again each day until they got their ransom money. Left alone, Lindhout resolved that she was better off dead. She would take a rusty razor to her wrists.
But as she held the blade in her hand, a small, brown bird flew into the doorway of the room where she was being held. It hopped on the dirty floor, looked at her and flew away. It was the first bird she’d seen since shortly after she was taken.
“I’d always believed in signs … and now, when it most mattered, I’d had one,” she writes. “I would live and go home. It didn’t matter what came next or what I had to endure. I would make it through.”
In an advance edition of a book, which is set for release next month, the 32-year-old details the brutal 15 months she spent in captivity along with Australian photographer Nigel Brennan. Titled A House in the Sky, the book is co-authored by Sara Corbett, a contributing writer with the New York Times Magazine.
The book reveals how Lindhout and Brennan’s families eventually gave up on the Canadian and Australian governments and co-ordinated the pair’s release themselves.
The final price for their lives: $1.2 million. About $600,000 went to the kidnappers as ransom. They’d originally asked for $3 million. The remaining money was spent on other costs, including a $2,000 per day fee for a private hostage negotiator. Federal Canadian officials also tried to enlist the help of people in the Somali government, she writes, but its leadership was in constant chaos.
She admits she was naive and inexperienced, travelling to a dangerous country for the thrill of adventure. As a Calgary cocktail waitress, she had saved her tips for backpacking trips around the world before turning to freelance journalism to further fund her travels.
She decided to take a chance on heading to Somalia. She knew it was dangerous but hoped to find a story that would launch her career.
She spoke on the phone with Brennan, a former boyfriend she’d met on a previous trip to Ethiopia, and blurted out an invitation for him to join her and take photos while she did TV news. He agreed.
They had only been in Somalia a few days when they got into a car with a hired fixer, driver and security guards and headed for a camp of displaced people outside the capital city of Mogadishu. On the way, armed men stopped them and dragged them from the vehicle.
While Lindhout and Brennan were kidnapped together, they had different experiences in captivity. Brennan was kept in a room with windows, furniture and books to read, but Lindhout was holed up in a dark room with rats. It was simple: he was a man; she was a woman.
Back in Canada, Lindhout’s family feared she was being sexually assaulted, but Canadian officials assured them Muslims were unlikely to do such a thing.
She says one captor, however, routinely sneaked into her room and forced himself on her.
Things got worse, she says, when she and Brennan tried to escape in early 2009. The pair used a nail clipper to dig bricks and metal bars out of a bathroom window, then crawled out and ran to a nearby mosque. When some of the guntoting kidnappers caught up with them, no one in the crowd would help — except one older woman.
She clung to Lindhout’s arms then threw herself onto Lindhout’s body as the men dragged their hostage out of the building. Lindhout says she later heard a gunshot echo from inside the mosque, though she says she never learned the fate of her helper.
The kidnappers blamed Lindhout for the escape. The next day, in a prayer room, they took turns violating her body.
In November 2009, Lindhout says, she was told she and Brennan were being sold to a more violent, rival group. As they were being passed over to strangers, Lindhout clung to a car door and had to be pulled away, screaming.
A few minutes later she realized they were actually being rescued. A ransom had been paid.
Lindhout was taken to a hospital in Kenya. She had broken teeth, ribs that constantly ached from being kicked and a skin fungus that had spread across her face.
She returned to Canada after about a week in hospital.
What kept her going for 459 days? Lindhout writes she got through the most painful times by constructing, in her mind, a house in the sky, where she got to eat whatever she wanted and embraced her friends and family.
She made a promise to herself that, if she were ever freed, she would find a way to honour the woman who tried to save her at the mosque. In 2010, she founded the non-profit Global Enrichment Foundation to help support education for women and girls in Somalia and Kenya.