John Goddard

(Toronto Star) — Few cut as glamorous a figure as the freelance journalist in a conflict zone, especially when she is a long-legged beauty.

Laptop computer, digital cameras and colourful headscarves in tow, she cinematically charms her way through police checkpoints and border crossings to report on war and humanitarian disaster.

The description fits Amanda Lindhout, Canada’s forgotten hostage in Africa.

The killing yesterday of British tourist Edwin Dyer in Mali, by an Al Qaeda wing, brings her ordeal to mind. So does the image last week of Lindhout begging for her life in a five-minute phone interview with Agence France-Presse in Paris.

“Unless my government, the people of Canada, all my family and friends can get $1 million, I will die here, okay? That’s certain,” AFP quoted her as saying from Somalia.

Three days later, a man calling from the capital Mogadishu offered the Star a similar interview, which was turned down for fear it would compromise rescue negotiations.

“The conditions are very bad,” Lindhout told AFP. “I don’t drink clean water. I am fed at most once a day … I have been sick for months.”

Lindhout, 27 years old at her capture, was living a spirited but progressively risky life. She grew up in the Alberta tourist town of Sylvan Lake, near Red Deer. Her family belongs to Red Deer’s First Christian Reform Church, whose website lists her father, John Lindhout, among those “unable to worship with us regularly due to illness or age.” He is said to have cancer. The family is not giving interviews.

After high school, Lindhout worked in a Calgary bar, her Facebook friends say. Briefly, she considered beautician school but set off instead to see the world.

“She has an amazing soul, that girl,” says Taron Hall, who met Lindhout in Calcutta, India, in January 2005, and travelled with her for the next two months.

In his YouTube tribute to her, “Amanda Lindhout Enjoying Life,” she can be seen mixing with Calcutta street children, laughing with northern Pakistani police officials and hitching a ride through mountains on the roof of a truck.

“We wanted to go to places where there were few travellers,” Hall said this week from Vancouver.

One blogger speaks of meeting Lindhout in Syria. Another of spotting her in Egypt.

“On one trip to Cairo, I meet a woman named Amanda,” writes Adam Katz. “This attractive brunette walks into our … $2-a-night guest house with her hair, makeup and nails done.”

In early 2007, Lindhout showed up in Kabul at the offices of Afghan Scene magazine, where she sold photographs of Kuchi tribal people. One made the cover.

“As well as being particularly beautiful, I found her a very gutsy young lady,” said Andrea Busfield, a Scene editor at the time.

“She didn’t stay that long,” Busfield said in an email yesterday from Cyprus. “I don’t remember her as part of the `scene’ in Kabul.”

In early 2008, Lindhout took a job in Iraq for Iranian news network Press TV and her reports begin to raise questions about her judgment. As a reporter, she became a propagandist for the Iranian regime, oozing anti-Americanism and contempt for Western media.

An example, entitled “The 4,000th U.S. Death in Iraq – Press TV, Tehran & Baghdad” and dated March 24, 2008, appears on YouTube. Baghdad’s Green Zone “is like an extension of the United States – Burger King and whatnot,” she tells the news anchor contemptuously. “The explosions I’m reporting to you about (outside Baghdad’s Green Zone) are not reported in the mainstream media.”

In May 2008, Lindhout quit Baghdad to freelance in Africa. On Aug. 16, the Red Deer Advocate ran a story of hers from Kenya.

Then, she made her fateful move.

“Next week I am going to Somalia to report on the deteriorating security situation as well as the food crisis, which has affected 2.6 million there,” she wrote in a freelance pitch to Canada’s Global Television.

On Aug. 20, she arrived with 37-year-old Australian photographer Nigel Brennan in Mogadishu, one of the world’s most lawless places.

On Aug. 23, Lindhout and Brennan were kidnapped by bandits 20 kilometres away at Afgoye, a shantytown for displaced people.

Their condition appears to be deteriorating. In February, word of a failed escape attempt reached Reporters Without Borders, Ambroise Piere on the Africa desk said this week from Paris.

Reports that Lindhout has since been beaten, raped and become pregnant cannot be confirmed, he said.

In the last month, fighting in Mogadishu has raged anew. More than 200 people have been killed and some 70,000 displaced – the type of crisis Lindhout was drawn to.

Comments

comments