Images of terrorism against Canadians
Horror of John Ridsdel’s fate resonates with the family of former hostage in Somalia
The sheer horror of international terrorism came home to Canada over the last 48 hours in searing words, tweets and images.
On Tuesday, a day after Amanda Lindhout and her mother shared with CBC Radio the tape of a phone call between them while Lindhout was held hostage in Somalia seven years ago, the militant Muslim group Abu Sayyaf released a video of the beheading last month of Canadian John Ridsdel.
Ridsdel, of Calgary, was one of four tourists — including fellow Canadian Robert Hall, a Norwegian man and Filipina woman — kidnapped Sept. 21 last year.
His execution was “brutal, barbaric, extremely graphic and most disturbing,” tweeted Rita Katz, of the Marylandbased company SITE Intelligence Group.
On the video, Katz tweeted, the kidnappers said 68-year-old Ridsdel was murdered “due to non-compliance of #Canadian Gov” in meeting ransom demands. She said the group threatened to kill the remaining hostages if demands were not met.
The three hostages are reportedly seen in the video asking the governments of Canada and the Philippines for help.
While “outraged” at the murder of Ridsdel, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Canada “will not pay ransom to terrorists, directly or indirectly,” for the release of hostages.
If anyone could understand the agony of the hostages’ families these past months, it would be Lindhout and her mother, Lorinda Stewart.
Lindhout, then 27, trying to make a career as a freelance journalist, was kidnapped in Somalia in August 2008 and held for 15 months, during which she was beaten, sexually brutalized and tortured.
She was released in November 2009 after her family and that of another captive, Australian Nigel Brennan, raised about $600,000 for ransom. But the two families were left virtually destitute by the ransom and the security firm’s bills. The tape played Monday on CBC Radio’s The Current made for heartbreaking listening. “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy, Mummy!” an almost incoherent Lindhout chokes through sobs at the outset of a call scripted by her captors and made Sept. 9, 2009, to her mother in Calgary.
It came 10 months into captivity after three days of torture, the increasingly frustrated kidnappers trying to hasten payment.
By then, the RCMP had largely withdrawn from Stewart’s aid and told her — though half-heartedly, she thought — that it was illegal for a Canadian to pay ransom, the CBC reported.
Had she known that police, despite their assurances of imminent breakthrough, would be of such little assistance, she would have started fundraising far earlier to gain Amanda’s release, Stewart said.
Stewart told CBC she had two objectives on the call: to calm and comfort her daughter, and to make clear to the kidnappers she was doing all she could to raise money but that she had few resources.
She taped the call and forwarded it through encrypted email to a kidnap-and-ransom specialist with a Britishbased private security firm she had hired.
Stewart was horrified that in a call days earlier she yelled at the captor known as Adam. She feared her daughter’s torture was the kidnappers’ response, she told CBC.
“My hands and feet were roped together, pulling in opposite directions,” Lindhout wrote in her book A House in the Sky. “I was immobilized. My body had been drawn into a taut bow. My muscles immediately started to scream . . . I was trussed up like an animal.”
She was held that way, blindfolded, for more than 48 hours.
When she was untied, one of the captors dictated notes for a phone call to Canada — the one Lindhout and Stewart would ever-after call the “bad call.”
“Today everything is changed,” Lindhout recalled him saying. “You tell your mum. Everything is changed.”
They threatened to torture her every day until the ransom — which they’d first set at $1.5 million (U.S.), but had dropped to $1 million, refusing Stewart’s offer of $500,000 — was paid.
Lindhout and her mother, knowing the tape would become public at the trial of a Somali man arrested last year in connection with her ordeal, decided to make it public to better control the interpretation, they told CBC. Ali Omar Ader, whom the RCMP believes was the main negotiator during Lindhout’s ordeal, was lured to Canada, arrested and charged in Ottawa last June.
Both women told CBC they understood the federal government’s position against paying ransom to terrorists — and the risk to all Canadians doing so would create.
But with Ridsdel’s recent murder in the news, they wanted Canadians to know the agony endured by both hostages and their families.
They urged the government to better support families through such ordeals and, even when a hostage is released, the long, slow recovery afterward.