I couldn’t believe I was free, Kenyan journalist says after kidnap

When James Gachamba, boarded a plane on May 11, 2014 for Somalia in search of greener pastures, he never imagined the horror that awaited him.

Gachamba, a journalist from Gatundu South, had clinched a job in a private hospital in Mogadishu.

But that dream was never to be. On November 24, that year Gachamba, together with another Kenyan woman were abducted by pirates. The 29-year-old remembers vividly that fateful day. He was in his house located in the hospital’s compound when they struck.

“The three men pointed an AK47 at me and told me to pack my belongings. They told me to call a Kenyan lady who also lived inside that compound. They confiscated our phones, passports and stole our cash,” Gachamba narrates to The Standard on Saturday.

They were whisked into a Toyota Land Cruiser and for more than ten hours, they drove through the bush until the next day to a remote village. Here, they were were locked up in a two-roomed house that only had a worn out mattress. It is here that their abductors revealed their mission.

“The abductors told us they were pirates. They said we had to each pay $1 million ransom if we wanted to secure our freedom, failure to which we would be killed. That terrified us,” he says.

The two Kenyans were kept in the house for three weeks under heavy guard. They were given food twice a day. Tired of being locked up, on week four, the duo hatched a plan to escape. They timed when the guards were asleep and ran away to a nearby mosque. However, their mission flopped. The pirates mounted a search for them in the entire village until they found them inside the mosque and took them back to captivity.

After their failed escape bid, they were locked up in the house for four months. Seven more heavily armed guards were brought to prevent future slip-ups. Once a week, the pirates would give them their phones and order them to call their relatives back home to ask for ransom. In May last year, they nearly succumbed to malaria.

“For weeks, we could not eat. Whenever we ate anything we vomited. We only survived on water. We lost hope. Somehow we recovered by the grace of God,” he recalls.

To conceal their whereabouts from Somalia government forces, the pirates kept on moving them from location to location. In January this year, they were moved to a home in another remote village. On February 17, they were woken up by gunshots at 3am. For hours, a gun battle between the pirates and their aggressors ensued, he recalls.

The pirates were cornered and Gachamba was rescued. He later came to learn that it was the Somalia government forces who had engaged the militants. “I couldn’t believe I was alive and free. Bullets were flying over our heads like crazy. It was horror. God saved us,” Gachamba says. His colleague was not lucky as some of the pirates eloped with her. Her whereabouts remain unknown. Gachamba is happy to be back home. Speaking at their home in Mundoro during a thanksgiving service on Sunday, Gachamba’s mother Florence Wanjiku said it is a miracle her son is alive.

“We were not sure we would see him alive again since we were not able to raise the ransom. We were always on our knees praying to God for a miracle,” she says. In the meantime, Gachamba is trying to piece his life back together.