DANIEL LEBLANC AND GEOFFREY YORK
Monday, September 07, 2015
Ali Omar Ader is shown in court in an artist's sketch. The Somali national faces charges in connection with the overseas hostage-taking of former journalist Amanda Lindhout.
(Greg Banning/The Canadian Press)
OTTAWA and JOHANNESBURG - The Mounties only had a phone number and some voice recordings to go on when they launched their investigation into the 2008 kidnapping of journalist Amanda Lindhout in Somalia.
Showcasing their new-found global reach, a team travelled to Africa to slowly track and then covertly approach one of the alleged captors. Ultimately, sources said, the RCMP relied on an ingenious “business proposal” to get him to travel to Canada so they could make an arrest, seven years after the hostage taking.
The ruse involved an offer of money, but also getting the suspect to believe he could have a new life – as an international author. Breaking the long-standing mystery over the police strategy that was put in place years ago, sources told The Globe and Mail that the RCMP brought Ali Omar Ader to Canada last June “by offering him a book deal.”
Ms. Lindhout’s autobiographical take on her ordeal, A House in the Sky: A Memoir, has spent months on various bestseller lists, and could now be turned into a movie. Mr. Ader seemingly thought he would have an audience for his own book, on the history of his homeland of Somalia.
The book deal was the perfect vehicle to get him to come to Canada, but also persuade him to provide his personal account of the kidnapping to undercover investigators in the final stages of the probe, sources said.
Mr. Ader was arrested a few days after he landed in Canada three months ago, when the RCMP announced it was using extraterritorial provisions in the Criminal Code to lay a charge of hostage-taking for a crime that happened thousands of kilometres away from Canada.
The arrest highlighted the RCMP’s growing interest in prosecuting cases in which Canadian citizens are victims of crimes on foreign soil. Last week, the RCMP announced it was charging a Syrian colonel, George Salloum, for inflicting torture upon Canadian engineer Maher Arar in 2002 and 2003. In both cases, the investigations were complex and long, with the one involving Mr. Arar lasting a decade.
Col. Salloum’s whereabouts are unknown, whereas Mr. Ader is in jail in Ottawa, awaiting a bail hearing.
The investigation into Ms. Lindhout’s kidnapping was code-named Project Slype, conducted using undercover operators, surveillance and wiretap interceptions, RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia told reporters in June.
“He was one of the main negotiators within the group involved in this,” Assistant Commissioner Malizia said in reference to Mr. Ader. “This investigation posed a number of significant challenges as it was carried out in an extremely high-risk environment, in a country plagued with political instability.”
An official involved in the investigation would only say at the time that the luring of Mr. Ader to Canada was done with the help of an “interesting manoeuvre.” In recent weeks, sources have provided key details of the investigation, allowing The Globe to piece together how the Mounties got the man who was allegedly known to Ms. Lindhout as “Adam” during her 15 months in captivity.
Ms. Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan were abducted from a road outside Mogadishu in August, 2008. They were released in November, 2009, after a nightmarish ordeal in which they were malnourished and beaten, and Ms. Lindhout was sexually assaulted.
The goal of the kidnapping was to obtain a ransom, which was eventually paid in a privately arranged deal.
“Adam was definitely a leader and decision-maker,” Ms. Lindhout said in an interview in June. She described him as “slightly deranged” – a man of “bizarre” actions, who terrified her by announcing that he would make her his wife.