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Mogadishu,
Somalia, August 29, 2009 (SL Times) – A French national that was held
hostage by a Somali faction was freed on Thursday. In an interview with
the BBC Somali Service on Aug.26, he claimed that he ran away while his
captors were asleep and walked for five hours until he reached the
“presidential palace” in Mogadishu.
The account he gave of his escape is simply not believable by any
stretch of the imagination. As pointed out by the BBC’s broadcaster, it
is just hard to swallow that a white man would safely walk around
Mogadishu for five hours in territory controlled by Islamists and then,
although he is unfamiliar with the city, find his way to the
“presidential palace”.
A simpler and more likely explanation is that ransom was paid (his
captors have said as much), and since, according to official sources, he
is “an agent with the French overseas intelligence agency, the General
Directorate of External Security or DGSE”, this means that the French
government paid the ransom.
This is an interesting twist because the French government, until
recently, was the only European country that had shown reluctance to
paying ransom and was willing to use force to free its hostages.
The irony here is that the French man (he said his name was Marc
Aubriere but as pointed by AFP this is probably not his real name) came
to Mogadishu with another French man who is still a hostage, to set up a
security detail for Sheikh Sharif. But instead of securing Sheikh
Sharif’s life, the two French men became hostages. Welcome to Mogadishu.
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