British Tourist, Kidnapped in Kenya, May Be in Central Somalia

William Davies/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Police officers patrolled the beach near Kiwayu Safari Village, a high-end resort in Kenya where a British couple were attacked.

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and MOHAMMED IBRAHIM

Published: September 18, 2011

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NAIROBI, Kenya — A British woman kidnapped from an exclusive Kenyan resort last weekend was snatched by a Somali pirate gang and is being held in central Somalia, witnesses said on Sunday night.

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• Somali Gunmen Attack British Tourists in Kenya (September 12, 2011)

The information was still patchy, but witnesses said that a group of pirates had recently arrived with a female hostage in a notorious pirate den hundreds of miles inside Somalia, showing that Somalia’s pirates have the reach and ambition to attack on land, and also inside Kenya.
The British government has asked journalists not to reveal the specific town the woman is being held in because they said that it could encourage other pirate gangs to converge on the spot and further endanger her safety.
Residents of the town said that they saw the pirates arrive Saturday night by boat with a white female hostage and that the pirates then went into trucks and disappeared.
“The British hostage was brought here last night and was taken to an unknown location,” said Nur Ahmed, a resident in the town. “I don’t really know where she was taken exactly.”
The Kenyan police have identified the hostage as Judith Tebbutt, who is in her 50s and severely hearing impaired. She was snatched on Sept. 11 at gunpoint in a late-night raid in which a gang of gunmen stormed her bungalow at an exclusive beach resort on the Kenyan coast, just south of the Somali border.
Ms. Tebbutt’s husband, David, apparently tried to fight off the attackers and was shot and killed. The gunmen then dragged Ms. Tebbutt into a speedboat and zoomed off.
Western officials were initially worried that an anti-Western Islamist group may have been behind the kidnapping and that it could have been connected to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. So it may bring a little relief to British officials that Somali pirates are now believed to be the culprits, because the pirates tend not to be politically motivated and are usually only interested in cash.
Over the past several years, Somali pirates have attacked hundreds of ships on the high seas and captured thousands of crewmen, holding the hostages for ransoms, typically for millions of dollars.
Still, this case is highly unusual because it happened on land and in Kenya, and the pirate gang would have had to refuel in port towns along the Somali coast controlled by the Islamist group the Shabab, implying some degree of cooperation between the Shabab and the pirates.
In recent months, the Shabab have taken over several pirate dens in central Somalia, and the pirates have said they are sharing their ransoms with the Shabab.

Jeffrey Gettleman reported from Nairobi, and Mohammed Ibrahim from Mogadishu, Somalia.