| British hostage Judith Tebbutt released in Somalia | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: March 21 2012, 07:50 PM (140 Views) | |
| Audi-Tek | March 21 2012, 07:50 PM Post #1 |
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British hostage Judith Tebbutt released in Somalia. Judith Tebbutt was abducted in September 2011 (AFP, Abdi Hussein) British hostage Judith Tebbutt (left) is escorted to a plane at Adado airport (AFP, Str) NAIROBI — British hostage Judith Tebbutt was freed in Somalia Wednesday, more than six months after being kidnapped in Kenya by gunmen who killed her husband, saying she was well treated by her captors. "I am just happy to be released and I'm looking forward to seeing my son who successfully secured my release. I don't know how he did it, but he did. Which is great," Tebbut, 57, told Britain's ITV news in Somalia. She was later flown to Nairobi, where the British embassy said she was in a "safe place." Tebbutt had been snatched on September 11 from a remote Kenyan beach resort near the Somali border by assailants who shot dead her husband David in a late-night raid. She said she felt "very relieved to have been released. Seven months is a long time and ... the circumstances, with my husband passing away, made it harder." BBC video footage showed a thin-looking but apparently cheerful Tebbutt, dressed in the flowing robes and coloured headscarf commonly worn by Somali women, being led towards a small aircraft. "There were some very hard psychological moments," she told ITV, faltering, "but I got through it." The Foreign Office in London confirmed Tebbutt's release in the Addado region, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Ethiopian border and 500 kilometres northeast of Somalia's capital Mogadishu. In a separate ITV interview filmed in the days before her release and broadcast Wednesday, Tebbutt said she was in good health and was not mistreated. "I sleep very well here," she said, adding she been ill three times during her captivity but received medication "almost immediately" and recovered. "My condition is good as far as I know. I feel fine. I've had absolutely no torture whatsoever. In fact, I've been made to feel as comfortable as possible by the pirates that are holding me." A local resident said a ransom of $1.2 million (900,000 euros) was paid to secure Tebbutt's freedom, but the figure could not be independently verified. "UK citizens of Somali origin were very much involved in the negotiations that led to the freedom of hostages," said Daud Ali, an Addado resident close to the mediators. Mohamud Ibrahim, a community elder, said negotiations started shortly after Tebbutt's capture and "expenses incurred during the captivity were very high." "The people in Addado were sympathetic to the hostage because she lost her husband and suffered too much at the hands of her abductors," he added. A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said it was not government policy to pay ransoms "... and we do not facilitate concessions to hostage-takers." Asked whether officials had advised the family not to pay a ransom, he replied: "All I can say is that we have been in close contact throughout." Pirates in the region also hold hundreds of hostages seized from ships in the Indian Ocean, and have in the past demanded multi-million dollar ransoms for the release of captives and of boats. Tebbutt was held by gunmen in the same lawless region notorious for its pirate gangs who held Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British couple seized from their yacht in 2009 and held for a year. Rachel Chandler, speaking on the BBC, said she felt "relief and happiness" for Tebbutt, offering the freed hostage reassurance that it is possible to "pick up the pieces of your life and ... live a normal a life again." The Tebbutts, from the town of Bishop's Stortford in southeast England, were attacked in their room at night. They were the only guests at the upmarket Kiwayu Safari Village, some 40 kilometres from the Somali border. A Kenyan court in September charged a resort night watchman with robbery with violence for the killing of David and kidnapping with intention to murder his wife Judith. The man denied the accusations and the trial continues. A French woman, Marie Dedieu, kidnapped from the same coastal area three weeks later, died in captivity. In October, gunmen captured two Spanish aid workers from Kenya's Dadaab refugee camp, who are believed to be still held in Somalia. The spate of attacks prompted Kenya to send troops and tanks into southern Somalia in October to attack the Al-Qaeda allied Shebab insurgents. Security was beefed up in the region after US special forces swooped in by helicopter on a night raid in January to rescue an American woman and a Danish man working for a demining aid agency in the area. |
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2:41 AM Jul 11