5 hours agoThe chilling confession of former al-Qaeda hostage who was held captive for six years (Photo)
Periskopi(9 years ago)
(9 years ago)Johann Gustafsson, a 36-year-old engineer, was on an adventure trip to Africa with a friend of his to see the continent with his own eyes and not only through books he had read about this country. His greatest interest was traffic accidents. Twenty - four hours after arriving at Timbuktu [...]
Twenty-four hours after arriving at Timbuktu in Mali, Gustafsson was taken hostage by a hotel. He and two other tourists entered the back of a truck. A fourth man, a German tourist, resisted and was shot dead in the country, reports “York Times”, Transmission Periscope.
This was November 25th 2011, the start of an almost six-year test for Gustafsson, which was held by Al Qaeda in the Sahara Desert of Islamic Magreb or AQIM the Al Qaeda branch in North Africa until it was released this year.
On June 26, Gustafsson, now 42, returned to Sweden. French Special Forces rescued a hostage, Sjaak Riyke, a Dutch citizen, in April 2015. Second, Stephen McGoen, a South Africa, was released in August.
More than two months after Gustafsson was expelled from the desert, he told his first story of captivity in a Stockholm museum.
During the first shocking months in the wilderness, he and others closed their eyes with bandages, then bound them so that they could not move. The threat of execution was dependent on them. In one of the many videos published by Al Qaeda, they were forced to wear orange wardrobes like prisoners of “Guantanamo”s.
I tried to explain that I am Swedish”, he recalls. “
Four months in captivity, the hostages made a strategic decision to return to Islam. “was to save my life”, he said. After the conversion they were no longer isolated, or forced to protect their lives through many videos that required compensation for their complete release.
“I see this as clearer evidence that converting actually helped change my”, he said.
Gustafsson told his prisoners that his government would never pay. When released, Sweden's foreign minister said it was the result of years of diplomatic efforts, not reward.
A retired European intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that $3.5m, or about $4.2m, was paid and negotiated through South Africa's charitable awards gift from the Gievers Foundation for the release of Mr. McGoa.
From his viewpoint within their camps, Gustafsson said it was clear that his captors had abundant financial resources.
“They are well-funded nowadays,” he said. “They say they haven't been, but now they are, and it's not hard to understand that their financing stems from European governments”, he added.
A 2014 New York Times report on the rewards collected by Al Qaeda collaborators found that the group had received at least $125m since 2008.
Al Kaeda in the Islamic Maghrebi rose more than a decade ago largely due to extraordinary bonus payments, which began in 2003 with the kidnapping of 32 European tourists released after governments paid about $5m or about $6m.
After their conversion to Islam, the hostages prayed, ate, and sat with their kidnappers. There was no need for prison walls when the Sahara lay hundreds of miles in every direction.
The kidnappers had a poor rescue crew. The leaders belonged to a strong religious sect. They had quietly entered the mountain over the past 15 years, trying to enforce Sheriat's law and recruiting immigrants from nearby countries to visit or rest.
They were illiterate, but they knew how to survive”, Gustafsson said.
Finally he declared that when you live there, you teach the landscape. You know where it smells at different times of the year. You know how storms move. All of this is so great”. /Periscopi/
