Somali pirates freed British hostage Judith Tebbutt on Wednesday, saying a ransom had been paid, more than six months after gunmen killed her husband and snatched her from a luxury beach resort in neighbouring Kenya.
Tebbutt’s kidnapping and the subsequent abductions of other foreigners prompted Kenya to send hundreds of troops into Somalia in October to try to crush the al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants that Nairobi blamed for the attacks.
“After efforts today, we have succeeded in the release of the British woman,” Omar Mohammed Diirey, a regional official, told Reuters from Adado in central Somalia.
TV footage showed Tebbutt, who is in her 50s, wearing a green headscarf and running towards a plane in a flat, barren landscape in Adado, Somalia. A man in a bush hat and safari jacket was seen accompanying her, his arm around her shoulder.
A pirate, who identified himself as Ahmed, told Reuters a ransom had been dropped by air, although it was not clear who had made the payment.
He said $800,000 had been received and another $140,000 went to brokers and handlers. Tebbutt was handed over to regional officials early on Wednesday after the ransom was paid.
In a statement from Nairobi, Tebbutt said she looked forward to returning home to her family and friends.
“I am of course hugely relieved to at last be free, and overjoyed to be reunited with my son Ollie,” she said.
“This however is a time when my joy at being safe again is overwhelmed by my immense grief, shared by Ollie and the wider family, following David’s passing in September last year. My family and I now need to grieve properly.”
The Somali government said it would assist in anyway it could to capture and arrest the kidnappers.
Tebbutt told ITV news she had not been mistreated, but had endured “some very hard psychological moments.”
She said she had been moved from house to house, especially after elite U.S. Navy SEALs launched a rescue operation in January to free two aid workers who had been kidnapped in October from the semi-autonomous Galmudug region.
“That night I was woken up and was moved around. It was very disorientating. To be woken in the middle of the night and moved and you’d stay there for a little while and then you’d move again,” she told ITV news.
The British government said it was not involved in any ransom payment.
A spokesman for Prime Minister David Cameron said: “Our position is that we do not pay ransoms and we do not facilitate concessions to hostage-takers.”
Gunmen raided the remote Kiwayu Safari Village north of the Kenyan coastal town of Lamu in the early hours of Sept. 11, shooting dead publishing executive David Tebbutt, 58, and escaping by speedboat with his wife to nearby Somalia.
Tebbutt later told BBC radio she had not known immediately that her husband had died.
“I didn’t know he’d died until about two weeks from my capture. I just assumed he was alive, but then my son told me he’d died. That was difficult.”
Speaking about her son, she said: “He’s been absolutely fantastic. I don’t know how he secured my release, but he did and I’m really happy.”
George Moorhead, owner of the now-closed resort which boasted luxury bungalows overlooking the Indian Ocean, told Reuters he was relieved Tebbutt would be reunited with her son but was sad at the loss of her husband.
Moorhead said he had shared drinks with the couple the night they arrived at the resort – the eve of the attack – and described them as being in good spirits as they chatted about their son and the safari they had been on.
“It was all a sudden, abrupt chain of events afterwards and everything was shattered, their lives and everything,” he said.
In the weeks after Tebbutt’s kidnapping, attackers abducted a disabled French woman from Lamu and two Spanish aid workers from a refugee camp in the east African country.
Blaming Somali insurgents, Kenya deployed its forces across the border, scrambling to beef up security along the porous frontier and reassure a spooked tourism sector.
Al Shabaab denied it was behind the seizures and pirates, who usually focus on hijacking merchant ships and yachts off the lawless country’s coast, said they had been holding Tebbutt.
A Kenyan man charged with robbery, violence and kidnapping in the Tebbutt’s case has pleaded not guilty to the crimes.
A court hearing in Lamu on Wednesday was postponed for a month after a judge ordered the prosecution to make witness statements available to the accused man, Ali Babitu Kololo.
Kidnapping for ransom has chiefly been carried out by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean but Somali gunmen have attacked Westerners just across the border with Kenya.
Piracy experts say cooperation between al Shabaab and pirate gangs has grown as the Islamist rebels become more desperate for funding.
Somalia has been in turmoil since warlords toppled dictator Mohammed Siad Barre in 1991. Somali government forces, Kenyan, Ethiopian and African Union troops from Uganda and Burundi are all battling the al Qaeda-allied militants.
On Wednesday the militants said they detonated a car bomb in the heart of Mogadishu, wounding two people, and police said they were investigating a second suspicious vehicle in the city.
