After living in the worst kind of hell on earth, and seriously contemplating taking her own life, one Canadian journalist was saved by a sign from “a messenger.”
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Freelance reporter Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped, tortured, and repeatedly raped for 15 months in war-torn Somalia, where she had traveled with her boyfriend at the time, Australian photographer Nigel Brennan, in 2008, according to The Daily Mail.
Just three days into their journey in the foreign land, the couple were kidnapped. Soon thereafter, their abductors called their respective families and demanded $1.5 million ransoms for each of their lives. For the ensuing 15 months, Brennan and Lindhout were beaten and starved, and she was sexually assaulted on a regular basis.
.@AmandaLindhout describes the first few months of captivity and how having her Aussie friend Nigel with her brought "some protection". #InterviewAU pic.twitter.com/F8z08rhh5U
— Interview (@InterviewAU) August 7, 2018
Today, Lindhout is back home in Canada, nearly 10 years after her harrowing capture. Though she has a sunny disposition now, her outlook wasn’t always as hopeful.
Struggling under the weight of the horrors staring her down each day for what most certainly felt like an eternity, Lindhout had reached the “calm decision” 13 months into the ordeal to take her own life using a small razor.
“I was really getting close to making this decision,” she recalled during a recent interview with Channel 7’s Andrew Denton. “[A]nd as the morning sun was coming up … a little bit of movement caught my eye … and there was a bird hopping around in this little bit of light.”
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She continued, “I’d always believed in signs of a messenger, in a way, to hold on.”
That little bird, she told Denton, “was a messenger” in the darkest season of her life.
From that moment forward, Lindhout said, her desire to commit suicide vanished and has never once returned. The young journalist, who was 26 years old at the time, remembered her mind being “flooded” with the “determination to survive no matter what,” confident she would one day be free and would be reunited with her family.
Prior to traveling to Somalia, Lindhout explained, she had lived and worked in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq for the previous year and a half.
“So while I knew there were risks to going into Somalia,” she said, “they were risks that I thought I was willing to assume.”
Having already travelled and worked in many of the world's war-torn regions @AmandaLindhout knew the kidnapping risks of Somalia were serious. #InterviewAU pic.twitter.com/izH5toszdP
— Interview (@InterviewAU) August 7, 2018
Five months into their imprisonment, Lindhout and Brennan, attempted to escape. The pair were able to loosen several bricks in their cellar and jump out a window before running toward a crowded mosque, where Muslims were engaged in midday prayer.
But just moments later, their captors saw them and began chasing after the kidnapped duo. As they ran, Lindhout said a woman, completely covered in Islamic garb, stepped toward her and embraced her.
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“She pulled me into her arms and in English she called me her sister,” the journalist said. “And then she turns to our kidnappers, begging them to let us go.”
Alas, they were both recaptured, and as they drove away, Lindhout recalled hearing “a gunshot inside the mosque and I still don’t know what happened to that amazing woman.”
After pretending to convert to Islam and making a plan to escape, @amandalindhout & Nigel made a daring dash away from captivity, hoping to find saving at a nearby mosque. #InterviewAU pic.twitter.com/S6Pvc9paIM
— Interview (@InterviewAU) August 7, 2018
As “punishment” for her unsuccessful escape attempt, Lindhout said she was locked in a pitch-black room, where she was raped time and again.
Finally, 460 days after their capture, Lindhout and Brennan were released because their families offered thousands of dollars to their captors and begged for their children to be spared.
A small cluster of men entered the dark room where Lindhout had been shackled. They sawed off the chains clamped around her ankles and, moments later, she and Brennan were ushered into a waiting vehicle.
The couple were driven several hours away to a different location. After arriving, Brennan and Lindhout were surrounded by about 40 Somali men and approached by an individual holding a mobile phone. Totally confused, Lindhout took the phone.
It was her mother.
“I put it to my ear and my mom’s on the other end and she says to me, ‘Amanda, you’re free,’” Lindhout said. “And all of these people had been organized by our families to get us out of Somalia.”
“A ransom had been paid,” she added, “and we came to understand all the ways that our freedom had come to be and the incredible sacrifices that people had made.”
In June, the Somalian man who orchestrated Lindhout’s kidnapping was sentenced to 15 years in prison, The Canadian Press reported. Ontario Superior Court Justice Robert Smith handed down the sentence for 40-year-old Ali Omar Ader.
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Ader was captured after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police convinced the Somali national to travel to Canada under the bogus pretext of signing a book deal. He was arrested in Ottawa in June 2015 and admitted to undercover officers he was paid $10,000 for his role in Lindhout’s capture.
Nearly a decade removed from her hellish experience, Lindhout said she takes joy in the simple blessings of life.
“The ability to move my body … the freedom to use the toilet when I wanted to … to be able to see the sky again,” she explained. “Just to be able to see the sky again, that’s over our head every day. I had never really looked up and really appreciated it until after my freedom.”