Save The Chandlers

ITN exclusive: Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British couple kidnapped by Somali pirates, have used their first full television interview in captivity to congratulate David Cameron on his election victory and to seek the backing of Britain’s new government in securing their freedom.

Paul Chandler, a 60-year-old retired civil engineer, said: “I’d like to say congratulations to David Cameron first. And as new prime minister, we desperately need him to make a definitive public statement of the government’s attitude to us.

“If the government is not prepared to help, then they must say so, because the gangsters’ expectations and hopes have been raised at the thought of a new government and there might be a different approach.”

The retired couple from Tunbridge Wells were enjoying the yachting holiday of a lifetime last October when they were kidnapped by pirates in the Indian Ocean just off the Seychelles, hundreds of miles from Somalia.

They have been held for more than seven months and reveal on Channel 4 News tonight that almost half their time in captivity has been spent away from each other in solitary confinement.

At first the pirate gang demanded a huge ransom for their release, though they have since said they are open to negotiation. It is official British government policy not to pay ransoms to kidnappers.

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By David Jones and Nick Wadhams
Daily Mail
March 20, 2010

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.

‘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.’

 

MOGADISHU, Somalia — A British yachting couple seized by Somali pirates and held in separate locations have been temporarily reunited after weeks apart, a doctor who treated the two said.

Paul and Rachel Chandler were suffering from severe anxiety brought on by their separation and captivity in war-ravaged Somalia, Dr. Abdi Mohamed Elmi Hangul told The Associated Press during an interview at Medina Hospital on Sunday. The two were seized from their yacht, the Lynn Rival, in October and have been held apart for most of their captivity. Hangul said the pirates had phoned him on Sunday and said the couple had been temporarily reunited.

“The two hostages were in different locations but I advised the guys to reunite the couple, because both of them were worrying about their separation but they now told me that the two people have reunited already,” he said.

Hangul treated the two hostages last month at the invitation of their kidnappers, in the camps where they were being held along the Somali coastline.

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