Amanda Lindhout attends a reception held in her honour by the Alberta Somali-Canadian community in Calgary on Sunday Feb. 21, 2010. Lindhout was kidnapped in Somalia in 2008 and held for more than a year being released in late 2009.
The worst torment of Amanda Lindhout's kidnapping ordeal began with a phone call to her mother from the Somali captor who called himself "Adam."
Furious at the delays in raising the ransom money, he issued a threat: "You think we're playing games? I'll show you games."
Six hours later, several captors came into her locked room in Somalia, trussed her hands and feet into an agonizing position and began abusing her. The abuse continued for three days and she is convinced that Adam's order led directly to it.
Ms. Lindhout remembered that torture on Sunday as she gave her first public comments on the RCMP's arrest of Ali Omar Ader – the alleged kidnapper she knew as Adam. The news of his arrest brought back "brutal memories," she said.
"Adam was definitely a leader and decision-maker," she said in an interview with The Globe and Mail. She described him as "slightly deranged" – a man of "bizarre" actions, a man who terrified her by announcing that he would make her his wife.
Ms. Lindhout said she was stunned when an RCMP agent told her that Mr. Ader had been arrested for her kidnapping ordeal in Somalia. Her knees buckled and she fell to the floor, crying and repeating, "Thank you, thank you."
She said she recognized her kidnapper's face immediately when she saw his photo on Friday. "It brought up anger, fear, confusion and also – knowing that he no longer poses a threat to me or to anyone else – a sense of relief," the Alberta-based author and advocate said in a separate written statement on Sunday.
She said Adam had terrorized and bullied her and her mother throughout her captivity.
Ms. Lindhout and Australian photographer Nigel Brennan were abducted from a road outside Mogadishu in August, 2008. They were released in November, 2009, after a nightmarish ordeal in which they were malnourished and beaten and Ms. Lindhout was sexually assaulted.
"[Adam] was erratic and bullying and fully complicit in my suffering," she said.
"It was he who collected the contact information for our families and who made most of the calls to them over the course of the next 141/2 months, demanding that a ransom be paid.
"He terrorized my mother, phoning her multiple times a day and at all hours."
During those conversations, Adam sometimes told her mother that he wanted to visit Canada, she said. "At different points, he expressed interest in marrying both me and my mother."
Earlier this month, Mr. Ader fulfilled his ambition of visiting Canada, but it swiftly led to his downfall.
The 38-year-old Somali citizen was arrested on Thursday night in Ottawa after a lengthy and complex investigation by Canadian police, including surveillance, wiretaps and undercover agents.
The RCMP said the investigation was carried out in "an extremely high-risk environment, in a country plagued with political instability."
Ms. Lindhout said she and her mother gave the police "hours of recordings" of telephone calls from Somalia.
Mr. Ader has described himself as a freelance journalist and "Web innovator" in Mogadishu and the founder of a publishing house.
He made a brief court appearance by video link on Friday and is charged with hostage-taking, under the Criminal Code.
The RCMP has not revealed how Mr. Ader was brought to Canada, but he may have been lured to the country, perhaps exploiting his long-standing desire to visit Canada.
On his Twitter account, he followed two tourism agencies, Destination Canada and the Canadian Tourism Commission.
In the interview, Ms. Lindhout would not give details of the RCMP's tactics, but she made it clear the police had outwitted Mr. Ader by persuading him to come to Canada.
"That wasn't a very smart decision he made to come into Canada, having been involved in a high-profile kidnapping of a Canadian citizen," she said.
Ms. Lindhout was at home in Canmore, Alta., when the RCMP phoned her on Thursday evening, a few hours after Mr. Ader's arrest.
"For more than five years now, I've met regularly with a team of investigators from the RCMP as they've worked on this case," she said in her statement. "They've been confident all along that they would eventually make an arrest, though it was always clear they were facing difficult and dangerous conditions. I'm not sure I ever quite believed it would happen."
She said she was "humbled" and proud to be Canadian because of the RCMP's unwavering pursuit of her kidnappers for many years.
"This operation was large and complex and involved many people across several continents," she said.
She described Adam as "educated and comparatively well off" and his children could sometimes be heard in the background of his phone calls to her mother.
He spoke better English than her other captors.
"I'm grateful that this man has been arrested," she said.
"I am happy that he will be called upon in court to answer for his role in the kidnapping. My healing and recovery, however, have never been contingent on this form of justice."
She said she has been feeling "extremely emotional" since learning of the arrest.
"But losing my freedom in Somalia taught me a lot about how to get it back," she added.
"Every day, I make the choice to move forward and to remember that true power is derived from kindness.
"In the end, Ali Omar Ader's fate has nothing to do with mine."
Geoffrey York