Kidnapping: Saudi Arabia urges citizens not to travel to Lebanon

September 16, 2013

Source: The Daily Star

BEIRUT: Saudi Arabia has warned its citizens against travel to Lebanon, reported the Saudi national news agency (SPA) Thursday. “The Foreign Ministry calls on all citizens not to travel to Lebanon for their own safety due to the current situation in the region,” SPA said.

Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon Ali Awad Asiri speaks during a press conference in Rabieh, Tuesday, July 2, 2013. (The Daily Star/Charbel Nakhoul, HO)

 

The Ministry also called on citizens living in or visiting Lebanon to contact the Saudi embassy in Beirut to provide them with the necessary assistance.

Last week, the U.S. urged its non-emergency staff and their family members to leave Lebanon, citing security concerns.

That announcement came after U.S. President Barack Obama said he would seek congressional approval for a military strike against the regime in Lebanon’s neighbor Syria. But Obama Tuesday urged Congress to put off the vote, vowing to explore a diplomatic plan from Russia to take away Syria’s chemical arms.

Lebanon has vowed to protect embassies in the country.

Caretaker Interior Minister Marwan Charbel said Wednesday that Lebanon regards as important the security of foreign embassies.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Lebanon Ali Asiri has recently said that his country has put in place a contingency plan for the evacuation of its nationals in Lebanon.

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Used and misused, the Stockholm Syndrome turns 40

September 3, 2013

Source: News Republic

Forty years after a Swedish hostage drama gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome”, the phenomenon is still being used, and misused, to explain the reactions of kidnap victims.

But one man knows exactly how it works. Jan-Erik Olsson remembers clearly the strange things that happened after he walked into a bank in the Swedish capital on August 23, 1973, pulled out a submachine gun and took four employees hostage.

 

-Police snipers on August 24, 1973 on a roof opposite Kreditbanken bank where Jan-Erik Olsson was holding workers hostage. Forty years after a Swedish hostage drama gave rise to the term “Stockholm Syndrome”, the phenomenon is still being used, and misused, to explain the reactions of kidnap victims.

“The hostages more or less sided with me, protecting me in some situations so that the police wouldn’t shoot me,” said Olsson, then a convict on furlough from prison, and now a peaceful 72-year-old.

“They even went down to use the bathroom and the police wanted to keep them there, but they all came back,” he told AFP.

The five-day hostage crisis, the first to be broadcast live to a mesmerised Swedish nation, created even more drama after police agreed to Olsson’s demand to have one of the country’s most notorious criminals, bank robber Clark Olofsson, brought there from prison.

Olsson, much less of a celebrity at the time, had kicked off the drama with the memorable line, “The party has only started!”, and initially he had scared the hostages.

 

Picture taken during the siege at Kreditbanken in Stockholm that began on August 23, 1973. The five-day hostage crisis, the first to be broadcast live to a mesmerised Swedish nation, created even more drama after police agreed to Olsson’s demand to have one of the country’s most notorious criminals, bank robber Clark Olofsson, brought there from prison.

“You could see the fear in their eyes,” Olsson said. “I only wanted to scare them. I’ve never done time for anything particularly violent.”

After a while, however, the fear turned into other more complex feelings, as a shocked Swedish public learned from one of the first telephone interviews with hostage Kristin Enmark.

“I’m not the least bit afraid of Clark and the other guy, I’m afraid of the police. Do you understand? I trust them completely. Believe it or not, but we’ve had a really nice time here,” she said.

Olsson and Olofsson eventually surrendered, and all the hostages were rescued. But that was not the end of the story.

From then on, the roles of captor and captive have been seen in an entirely different light, and the “Stockholm Syndrome” still conveys expert status to Frank Ochberg, the American psychiatrist who coined the expression.

Ochberg, who testified during the recent trial of Ariel Castro, the 53-year-old Cleveland man who abducted and tormented three young women for a decade, said the Stockholm Syndrome has three elements.

First, there are “the parts that generate attachment and even love on the part of the hostage for the hostage holder,” he said.

The second part is the reverse — when the kidnapper reciprocates and begins to care about the victim.

“That’s the reason we sometimes want to generate the Stockholm Syndrome if we can, when we’re dealing with a hostage situation,” he said.

The third element is both parties’ mutual contempt for the outside world.

Typically, the event happens very suddenly and hostages are terrified to the point where they have a sense of knowing, not just thinking, they are going to die, according to Ochberg.

“Very early on, they are denied the ability to speak, to move, to use the toilet, to eat. And then they are given those gifts of life, and as they receive them they have the feelings… we have when we are infants and close to our mother,” he said.

Since it was first identified, experts have disagreed on just how common the Stockholm Syndrome is.

At first, there was a “pendulum swing” to always look for it, but after FBI negotiators questioned its prevalence, it “swung back to where I think it should be, somewhere in the middle,” Ochberg said.

The term has filtered into everyday language and is sometimes used incorrectly.

Austrian teenager Natascha Kampusch emerged in 2006 after being held captive for eight years in an underground bunker, where she was abused, starved and raped.

But she admitted crying when hearing about the death of her tormentor, and has said she has “grown apart” from her parents, leading to speculation that she might be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

“Once a person is set free, they may feel closer to their captor than to those who were prior friends and family. I wouldn’t call this Stockholm Syndrome,” Ochberg said.

As for Olsson, the ex-bank robber has stuck to the straight and narrow since leaving prison in 1980, working as a car salesman in Sweden and as a farmer in Thailand, where he lived for 15 years with a Thai woman he married 24 years ago.

“I don’t think I would like to have (the robbery) undone because it’s been a large part of my life and a lot of things have happened afterwards,” he said, but added that he did regret all the years of his life he spent in prison — even though two of his hostages came to visit him there.

Asked if he thought the condition really did exist, he said: “What the heck is a syndrome anyway? I don’t know.”

 

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Rallies across France for four Frenchmen held hostage for 1000 days in Niger

June 16 , 2013

Source: krmagazine

The families of four Frenchmen who were taken hostage in the North African republic of Niger in 2010, are planning rallies across France next week. Today, Thursday, June 13, marks the 1000th day of their loved ones being held captive by insurgents linked to al-Qaida in North Africa

Rallies across France for four Frenchmen held hostage for 1000 days in Niger

The families of four Frenchmen who were taken hostage in the North African republic of Niger in 2010, are planning rallies across France next week. Today, Thursday, June 13, marks the 1000th day of their loved ones being held captive by insurgents linked to al-Qaida in North Africa.

The four French hostages were variously employed by French companies Areva, Vinci and Sogea Satom when they were taken hostage on Sept. 16, 2010, in the town of Arlit, north Niger, by a group claiming to be part of al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), reports 20 Minutes. Areva employee Daniel Larribe and his wife Françoise were among seven people originally kidnapped by AQIM along with five employees of Satom, a subsidiary of the Vinci construction group. Although Françoise Larribe and two of the Satom employees were released in February 2011, Daniel Larribe and three Satom workers, Pierre Legrand, Thierry Dol and Marc Ferret have remained in captivity.

Now, the families of the four remaining Niger hostages plan to hold rallies across France in the cities of Nantes, Nimes, Aix-en-Provence, Orleans and Valence, as well as the French capital, Paris, on June 22, as a reminder of the plight of the four whose whereabouts and safety remain unknown. In a statement released Wednesday, representatives of the four families said, “A thousand days in the wilderness, away from everything and everyone. A thousand days: two and a half years, almost three. A thousand days is intolerable. They need to come back now.”

Understandably, all the families are concerned at what they see as the intolerable delay in any move to have the hostages released. During almost three years of uncertainty, the families have received only bits and pieces of information about their loved ones. When asked recently about the hostages, a spokesman for Quai d’Orsay — the French Foreign Office — had declined to comment “for security reasons and out of respect for the families,” 20 Minutes reported.

A video of the four French nationals held hostage was released by AQIM in September 2012 although it was impossible to verify when the video was filmed, (see accompanying Euronews video). The video showed the hostages in apparent good health. AQIM blamed the French government for delaying negotiations which might lead to the hostages’ release.

For the French government, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius met with hostages’ families in January 2013, telling them that “their loved ones were alive and healthy,” even though they were being held in “very difficult” conditions, reports World Nuclear News. Foreign Minister Fabius said at the time, “As frustrating as it may be, the treatment of cases of kidnapping in fact requires the utmost discretion, in the interests of efficiency and in the interest of the hostages.”

The minister confirmed to hostages’ relatives that those held captive were being properly fed and had access to medical treatment. He also said letters written to the hostages by their families had been delivered to them, adding, “Like all of us, I share the anxiety and impatience of the families in these difficult times.” Fabius concluded that the French president, government and businesses were “determined to secure the release of the hostages and their return to France as quickly as possible.”

But for the hostages’ families, another six months have slipped by since Fabius’ encouraging statement and there is concern at the apparent inaction on the part of the French government. In mid-April this year, French President Françoise Hollande had put down the lack of progress to lack of response on the part of the kidnappers saying, “We have wanted (contact) for weeks, if not months.”

Despite matters being compounded by the French intervention in Mali, there was some comfort for relatives of hostages this week. Philippe Hugon, director of research at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations (IRIS), in charge of Africa told 20 Minutes, “The various intermediate networks between the kidnappers and the negotiators are moving, they are recovering.”

Referring to the release of a French family, taken hostage in Cameroon in February and released, relatively quickly, in April, Mr. Hugon said, “The situation of the French family taken captive in Cameroon was less complex. In this [Arlit, Niger] case, the release of the hostages is more difficult because the war in Mali, where France is at the forefront, is not finished and because these hostages represent financial and strategic issues important to jihadist groups.”

Encouraging words perhaps, but as 20 Minutes reports, the families of the hostages are tiring of what they see as the “lack of explanations” from the French authorities. As René Robert, grandfather of hostage Pierre Legrand put it, “Since the French military intervention in Mali, [the hostage situation] has become a total unknown. There’s been no explanation as to why matters are taking so long. We expect deeds as well as words. We just want our guys back.”

Few in France will disagree with that sentiment.

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The Algerian fuck-up – 35 killed in an attempt to rescue the hostages

January 17, 2013

Source: Daily Mail,

‘Al-Qaeda have got me’: Trapped oil worker’s desperate phone call to family from Algerian gas siege where ’35 hostages were killed’

• Stephen McFaul barricaded himself into room as militants raided complex
• Was on phone to family who heard gunfire in distance as line went dead
• But he managed to escape as Algerian forces launched bungled rescue
• David Cameron said Britain should be ‘prepared for the possibility of further bad news’
• Prime Minister said one British national has been confirmed dead
• Helicopters ‘began strafing’ complex, also killing 15 militants, claim rebels
• Militants had earlier threatened to blow up the hostages if they intervened
• Al-Qaeda group also demand safe passage out of facility with the hostages

An oil worker held hostage at an Algerian gas plant made a desperate ‘last phone call’ to tell his family he had been captured by al-Qaeda hours before a botched rescue attempt killed up to 35 foreigners.

Stephen McFaul, who later escaped, barricaded himself into a room with dozens of others as armed militants stormed their compound in the remote African desert.

Islamic extremists launched an attack on BP’s Saharan oil field in revenge for France’s crackdown on rebels in neighbouring Mali. Britain is providing support and so became a target.

As the terrorists closed in, the 36-year-old father made what he feared may be his final call his family to say ‘al-Qaeda have got me’, his brother revealed today.

Mr McFaul’s family today revealed that he managed to escape alive, but up to 35 others are feared dead after Algerian forces launched air strikes overhead in a bid to rescue the trapped workers.

The assault on the was made without warning Western allies including David Cameron.

Fighting back tears, Mr McFaul’s brother, Brian, said of his sibling’s frantic phone call: ‘They locked themselves in a room for safety.

‘At that stage they heard gunfire. They kept talking and he gave me a text, but then we lost contact.

‘Than at 9am that morning he phoned saying al-Qaeda have got me’.

Mr McFaul’s family have told of their joy after receiving a phone call from him at 3pm today saying he was alive and well.

His 13-year-old son, Dylan, told the BBC: ‘I can’t explain the excitement. I can’t wait until he gets home. I’m going to make sure he never goes back there.’

His father, Christopher, added: ‘The last 48 hours have been hell, but as a family we have been very strong.’

 

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