Tuesday, January 06, 2009
The pair were kidnapped on Nov. 26 in Bosasso, the main port in Somalia's northern breakaway region of Puntland, while on assignment for the British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph to cover piracy in the Gulf of Aden.
"After we were kidnapped, we had to walk at least 15 hours a day in the mountains, often at night. We would climb, rest a little and continue. We did that for two days," Cendon told AFP from Nairobi.
According to security sources in Puntland, the fixer and translator the journalists had employed for their trip were involved in the abduction.
"Eventually, we reached a place the gunmen considered safe enough," said Cendon, a 34-year-old freelance photographer who has regularly contributed to AFP's coverage in the Horn of Africa.
"We were staying in open caves that weren't very deep but enough to shelter us from the wind and cold. The place was okay, we didn't have room service but almost, they would actually bring us tea in bed in the morning," he said.
"We played a lot of chess on a home-made board. You could say that I was the overall winner," he joked. "After all that time, Colin became a very good friend."
Cendon said he was not at liberty to discuss all the modalities of his release and whether or not a ransom was paid.
"Colin and I were speculating a lot but we didn't know much about the negotiations . . . Our kidnappers were actually decent. They didn't speak any English but we were able to communicate a little in broken Arabic," he said.
"There were generally around 12 of them watching us at any given time. They all had Kalashnikovs. On the day of the release, there were maybe 50 of them, it was a whole army," he said.
"They seemed really good at what they were doing. There were no arguments between them, they were very well organized, which was good for us in a way," Cendon explained.
In an account in The Daily Telegraph, Freeman, 39, said at one point the captors acted out a mock execution with him.
"Sometimes the kidnappers would threaten to harm us, and on one occasion they cocked a Kalashnikov rifle at my head and made a convincing pantomime of my imminent execution," he wrote.
The indication that they were finally to be released came when one of the captors stuck his head into the cave, saying there was another telephone call from London.
The gang leader Moussa "cracked a rare grin and uttered two words in the fractured Arabic that was the only mutual language we had: 'Al yom,' meaning today," wrote Freeman, chief international correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph.
Cendon said he did not have the impression that the clan that held him and Freeman for more than five weeks had close connections to sea piracy.
The semi-autonomous region of Puntland in northern Somalia serves as a base for pirates who have been blamed for more than 100 attacks on ships in 2008.
Both Cendon and Freeman flew from Bosasso to Hargeysa, in neighbouring Somaliland, and arrived in Nairobi late Sunday, in good health and high spirits.
"In the cave, we ate mainly rice, boiled goat meat, sometimes spaghetti and a kind of bread baked on ashes to which they would add some sauce," he said.
"Only a couple of times did they have a slightly threatening attitude, but there was nothing very scary about our captivity. I never felt that my life was in danger," Cendon said.
"My captors would joke and call me Osama bin Laden. When I saw myself in a real mirror for the first time in weeks on the day of the release, I understood why," said a clean shaven Cendon, speaking from the comfort of the Spanish ambassador's residence in Nairobi.
Source: AFP, Jan 06, 2009