Who is Ali Omar Ader, the 37-year-old Somali man accused in Amanda Lindhout’s 2008 kidnapping?
Amanda Lindhout said Sunday she recognized the Somali arrested by the RCMP in Ottawa last week as the kidnapper who had communicated with her family, demanded a ransom and mused about marrying his Canadian hostage.
“In Somalia, I knew this man as ‘Adam,’” Lindhout wrote on Facebook in her first public comments on the arrest. She said the suspect had “terrorized” her mother with his phone calls. “I’m grateful that this man has been arrested.”
The RCMP has said little about Ali Omar Ader, a 37-year-old Somali national, except that he was one of the main negotiators after Lindhout and Australian Nigel Brennan were taken hostage in 2008 by a “group of militants.”
But Somali officials said Ader was formerly active in the Somali extremist group Al-Ittihad Al-Islam and more recently had been involved in a variety of pursuits, including running an Internet café in Mogadishu and a food store in Galkayo.
He was not a member of the armed Islamist group Al Shabab but rather acted as a “facilitator” for a variety of actors in Somalia, a Somali official said. Ader has been charged with kidnapping and is not facing any terrorism-related charges.
In an interview on Sunday, Lindhout said Ader had never mentioned AIAI or any other groups. He wasn’t particularly religious and didn’t speak about jihad, she said, and he referred to the youths holding her simply as “the gang.”
AIAI is now defunct, having been eclipsed by the Islamic Courts Union and Al Shabab. But it is still listed as a terrorist organization by Canada, which says on the Public Safety website that the group has reported links to Al Qaeda and has engaged in “bombing, assassination attempts, and the kidnapping and murder of aid workers.”
Following a lengthy investigation called Project Slype, Ader was arrested on Thursday, although the details of how he ended up in Ottawa are murky. RCMP Assistant Commissioner James Malizia said the probe involved the use of undercover operators, wiretaps and surveillance.
“He is a Somali national, he is not a resident of Canada and his role in the hostage taking was that he was one of the main negotiators,” Malizia said. “All I can tell you at this point is that the evidence we were able to gather allowed us to confirm and demonstrate that he was one of the negotiators within the group that was involved in this.”
He terrorized my mother, phoning her multiple times a day and at all hours
Being the alleged negotiator may have left him more vulnerable to police. By communicating the ransom demands, he would have left a trail consisting of phone numbers, his voice and the memories of his two victims, who were freed after 14 months.
“He introduced himself to me and my colleague, Nigel Brennan, on the day we were taken hostage,” Lindhout wrote on Facebook. “He struck me as educated and comparatively well-off. He spoke English better than most of our other captors and was based in Mogadishu.”
Lindhout called him “erratic and bullying and fully complicit in my suffering.” Ader collected contact information of the hostages’ families and made most of the calls to them, demanding a hefty ransom for their release.
“He terrorized my mother, phoning her multiple times a day and at all hours. He also revealed things about himself, speaking to her about his desire to visit Canada, for example. At different points, he expressed interest in marrying both me and my mother. His children could sometimes be heard playing in the background of his calls.”
In her bestselling memoir A House in the Sky, written with Sara Corbett, Lindhout said “Adam” had been a teacher before becoming involved in jihad. He worked mostly out of his home in Mogadishu, where he lived with his two children.
“Adam was the communications man,” she wrote. “In the transcripts of the calls with my mother, which I would read much later, he referred to her often as ‘Mom,’ and once or twice asked whether it would be okay if he married me.”
Perhaps because of the state of almost total lawlessness in Somalia at the time, he did not seem concerned about being caught and had rejected an early offer of $250,000 that had been put together by the governments of Canada and Australia, she wrote.