Amanda Lindhout to return home eventually

Canadian freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout, recovering in Kenya after spending 15 months as a hostage in Somalia, is expected to be back in Canada early this week.

A website of supporters has posted a message that states the Canadian government will send a plane to Kenya to bring Amanda and her family home early this week.

It's not known exactly when or where they will land.

While a spokesman for Lindhout's parents, who live in Sylvan Lake, Alta., confirmed last Tuesday that she had been released from a hospital in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, a spokeswoman for the Department of Foreign Affairs refused to confirm the posting, saying the family is asking for privacy.

“As you can appreciate, the Lindhout family needs to be together now undisturbed,” said spokeswoman Lisa Monette to the Canadian press. “We are respectful of the family’s wish for privacy and will not provide further information at this time.”

The report that she will step foot on home soil this week was also not confirmed Sunday by any members of Lindhout’s family, none of whom responded to messages from Canadian media. On Monday, however, a family spokeswoman was confirming that Amanda Lindhout will return to Canada this week. Sarah Geddes says in an email that freelance journalist Amanda Lindhout and her family have left Nairobi.

Lindhout, 28, and Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan, 38, were released on Nov. 25 during a nighttime exchange for ransom money, on a road south of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Since then they have been in Kenya undergoing medical treatment and recuperating from her ordeal.

The pair had been ambushed by gunmen on Aug. 23, while making their way to report on a camp of destitute people near Mogadishu.

But as the two journalists prepare for their eventual journey back to Canada, friends of Lindhout say there are several people who have gone unthanked and unacknowledged and received threats from the hostage takers as well as from the governments and families.

Among them a Somali whose life was endangered by his efforts to contact the kidnapped Canadian and Australian.

Ahmed Muhammed, a video journalist, continues to receive threats for his efforts. The lives of his family members were also put at risk when he arranged for telephone conversations between hostage negotiators and the kidnappers.

“No one has thanked Ahmed yet, and he did a very brave thing back then, he risked a lot,” Manasieva-Singh, a colleague and former Press-TV journalist said Sunday in an e-mail to the Calgary Herald. Manasieva-Singh said that despite his invaluable contribution, Muhammed now “feels used, abused and tossed aside.”
Chris Gelken, who co-created the Facebook group, also said that “the governments of Canada and Australia made various vacuous and what can only be described as misleading statements to Ahmed,” and that his “usefulness was forgotten.”

While hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent on the rescue effort, partly raised by Calgary businessmen Michael Going and Steve Allan and used to hire a British mercenary agency and both the Canadian and Australian families had also governmental help as well the assistance by Australian millionaire Dick Smith and parliamentarian Brown to pay the ransom, that reportedly ranged between half and one million dollars, Gelken said: “Ahmed is not seeking financial reward .... But the gunmen haven’t forgotten Ahmed,” - while he received not even a "Thank you!".

"The biggest fears the two governments involved had all the time along," says an analyst close to the scene, "was that one of the hostages would get free with the help of friends while the other staid back - that would have ultimately cost the head of the minister of the one left behind. That fear caused at the end that the governments really worked together and abstained from childish games, which surmounted in actual abandonment for almost 80% of the hostage time."

"The time will come when the true story is out and the grip of those, who have to protect their selfish interests, can not hold Nigel and Amanda any longer back from knowing the whole truth of their ordeal. They are journalists and with time they will find the real history and then also have a possibility to link with Ahmed and others."

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