What Happened To Somalia Pirate Hostage?
Jessica Buchanan, an American aid worker held hostage in Somalia for 93 days beginning in 2011, has spoken for the first time about her terrifying ordeal and dramatic rescue by a Navy SEAL team
What Happened To Somalia Pirate Hostage?
Jessica Buchanan, an American aid worker held hostage in Somalia for 93 days beginning in 2011, has spoken for the first time about her terrifying ordeal and dramatic rescue by a Navy SEAL team.
In 2011, Buchanan, 32, was working in northern Somalia, where she was helping raise awareness about how to avoid land mines. That October, she traveled from the relatively safe north to the much more dangerous south. The night before leaving, Buchanan sent her husband, Erik Landemalm, also an aid worker there, a prescient text message: “If I get kidnapped on this trip, will you come and get me?”
On the trip back from the south to the north, Buchanan and another aid worker, a 60-year-old Dane named Poul Hagen, were surrounded by a band of AK-47 wielding, speed-crazed Somali land pirates; Buchanan and Hagan had been betrayed by the very man hired to protect them.
Buchanan told 60 Minutes, “I figured they were going to rape me and then kill me. And I just keep thinking, ‘This can’t be the end of my life. I am only…….[access full story]
