By David Jones and Nick Wadhams
Daily Mail
March 20, 2010
The text said British hostage Rachel Chandler had been shot. But here, in a chilling interview, her pirate captors reveal she and her husband are still alive… but as far from salvation as ever.
Rachel Chandler and her husband are as far from salvation as eve
Rachel Chandler shot. Please call urgently … That was the dramatic and brutally short text-message sent to us by our Somali contact last weekend.
And like every such missive about the British couple held by pirates in the Horn of Africa, it demanded to be checked.
The Daily Mail has the mobile-phone number for the gang’s spokesman, a lugubrious sounding character who calls himself Ali Gedow, and we immediately tried to call it.
But separating fact from fiction in this intractable saga is never easy. For one thing, ‘Ali’ rarely deigns to answer unsolicited calls, and when he does his heavily accented English is rendered incomprehensible by whisky and khat, the pirates’ drug of choice.
For another, one never knows whether to believe his rambling pronouncements, for the pirates have become as adept as Alastair Campbell at manipulating the media, to increase the pressure on those negotiating to free their hapless captives.
And so it was now. After reportedly confirming to a Somali radio station that 56-year-old Mrs Chandler had indeed received gunshot wounds in some unspecified incident, by the time we got through to him last Monday, pirate Ali had changed his story.
Kidnapped: Paul and Rachel Chandler were sailing around the world when their boat was hijacked by Somalian pirates
‘No, it is a mistake - another girl was shot, not Rachel Chandler,’ he told the Mail during our longest and most lucid interview since the Kent economist and her husband, Paul, were kidnapped while yachting in the Indian Ocean.
‘Two of our pirates had an argument, and one fired his gun, hitting a Somali girl who was with Rachel in the leg. Rachel was close by at the time but she was not injured. She is quite OK.’
In a bizarre aside, he added that the pirates have given Mrs Chandler a gun with which to ‘protect herself’ from renegade guards.
Why would they risk this when she could use the weapon to shoot her way to freedom? ‘She will never do this,’ he replied with a hollow laugh. ‘There are 100 of us and she is alone in the desert. She knows she would be killed.’
For good measure, Ali added that Mrs Chandler - who has appeared dangerously thin and close to breaking point on video appeals sanctioned by the pirates - is now much improved in health and spirits.
Her 60-year-old husband, who seems to be bearing up better than his wife, was also faring well, he claimed.
‘We have given them books and a radio. They stay in a comfortable tent and they eat pirate food with us; sometimes we even drive them around to show them the scenery,’ he said, making it sound as though they were on an extended holiday.
‘If they get sick we give them herbal medicines made from leaves. They are not together any longer. We’re keeping them a few miles apart. But they are relaxing with our people.’
Relatives of the British couple held hostage by Somali pirates have welcomed reports that they could soon be released.
