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Freed hostages Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan pose for photographers in Somalia's capital Mogadishu.STR

On the 459th night of their captivity, Amanda Lindhout and Nigel Brennan were yanked out of their rooms, stripped, given new clothes and bundled into a car. They had no idea where they were going.

Since gunmen abducted them 15 months ago, the two journalists had already been moved 11 times within Mogadishu, one of the world's most dangerous cities, and Kismayu, an Islamist stronghold. Beaten and tortured, Ms. Lindhout, a freelance reporter from Sylvan Lake, Alta., was deeply despondent.

But on Wednesday she and Mr. Brennan, an Australian photographer, were driven to a government checkpoint and handed over.

"There were some pretty dark moments," Ms. Lindhout told CTV News Wednesday. "It was the idea of coming home, a reunion with my family, that kept me going."

Put up in a Mogadishu hotel, they were flown to Nairobi Thursday morning, said Somalia's National Security Minister Mohamed Abdullahi.

Journalists waiting at the airport in Mogadishu were not able to speak to them because they were in a convoy of vehicles full of government soldiers and African Union peacekeepers.

The circumstances of their release remain sketchy. It began when Ms. Lindhout's father remortgaged his house a month ago. Although a deal for the pair's release failed last week, four Somali politicians intervened and a Calgary security firm got involved, resulting in the paying of a ransom.

"They [the kidnappers]took the money, and I don't know how much money was paid for us, which was paid by our families," Ms. Lindhout, 28, told CTV Wednesday. "It's been sort of going on for the last two-three weeks and then tonight finally everything came together."

One of the kidnappers, who called himself Noor, told The Globe and Mail in a telephone interview: "They were released after long negotiated deal between us and the negotiators. They are now free … our demand was partially met."

A Calgary-based security consultancy, Diligence Ltd., is involved in the case, its CEO, Daniel Clayton, confirmed to The Globe and Mail. The company provided "regular intelligence reports on the case of what we found out" to both the family and the federal government, Mr. Clayton said.

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent on that operation," he said.

Earlier this year, the kidnappers had dropped their ransom demand from $1-million to $100,000 (U.S.), according to a Somalia press organization. The final amount paid is unclear. The Associated Press reported that it was $700,000; Agence-France Presse said it was $1-million - a number echoed by Mr. Clayton.

Just a month ago, Ms. Lindhout's father, John, took a short drive from his home in Sylvan Lake to Red Deer to amend his mortgage, indebting himself by an additional $145,100.







The ordeal began on the morning of Aug. 23, 2008, when gunmen ambushed the vehicle of Ms. Lindhout and Mr. Brennan, who were researching a story on Somalia's internally displaced people.

"It was extremely oppressive," Ms. Lindhout said of their captivity. "I was kept by myself at all times. I had no one to speak to. I was normally kept in a room with a light, no window, I had nothing to write on or with. There was very little food. I was allowed to use the toilet exactly five times a day.

"So, basically, my day was sitting on a corner, on the floor, 24 hours a day for the last 15 months. There were times that I was beaten, that I was tortured. It was an extremely, extremely difficult situation," she said, her voice quavering.

Ms. Lindhout said her kidnappers showed no ideological agenda and were just trying to get a ransom. The kidnappers hit her because they believed it would make their financial demands more convincing during the scripted phone calls they forced her to make to her mother every few months.

"The money wasn't coming quickly enough for these men," Ms. Lindhout said.

Mr. Brennan said he was pistol-whipped. He also said the captors threatened to sell them to Al-Shabaab, the Islamist Somali movement that controls Kismayu and has been linked to al-Qaeda.

In an online posting last month to supporters of her daughter, Ms. Lindhout's mother, Lorinda Stewart, expressed frustration at Ottawa's handling of the case.

"Oddly the government does not seem to think Amanda has that many supporters," Ms. Stewart wrote.

There had been several rounds of negotiations. In August, groups that had been in contact with the kidnappers were asked to step aside by Lindhout family members, who said they had hired private contractors, according to the National Union of Somali Journalists.

After the aborted deal last week, Ms. Lindhout slumped in despair. A chartered plane even arrived in Mogadishu in anticipation of the captives' release. But after learning about the plane, four Somali parliamentarians stepped in and were involved in negotiating the release, said one of them, Ahmed Diiriye.

On Wednesday, with Ms. Lindhout still in Somalia, Natalie Sarafian, the press secretary of Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon, declined to comment beyond acknowledging media reports of the release.

Ms. Lindhout, meanwhile, said she kept her spirits up during her captivity by thinking of happier places, like Vancouver's Stanley Park.

With reports from Edward Osborne in Calgary, Colin Freeze and Stephanie Chambers in Toronto, Reuters and Associated Press

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