Mark Budzanowski could almost feel his captors' mood sag when they rifled through his pockets and found his passport. The word Canada on the cover was a blow to the dozens of masked men who surrounded him in the nondescript basement somewhere in the Gaza Strip. They thought they had kidnapped an American.
At first, the men in the masks didn't believe their eyes, and questioned the 57-year-old aid worker about Canada and about specific shops near Mr. Budzanowski's residence on Carlton Street in Toronto.
When they were finally convinced that Mr. Budzanowski was not an American in disguise, he said, they started treating him more politely, and handling him less roughly.
"When they were certain I was Canadian, they were very disappointed. Then, they told me, 'We love Canada.' That's wonderful to hear when you have guns pointed at you," an exhausted Mr. Budzanowski said yesterday in a telephone interview shortly after he was released after almost 30 hours as a hostage.
"It's wonderful to have a Canadian passport because it changes people's minds. One of the guards kept asking me to say hello to Canada, so it does stand for something."
His former captors had taken a liking to him toward the end of the hostage-taking and one — the one who kept asking him to say hello to Canada — even gave him a phone number to call if he ever needed the help of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
"I don't intend to use it, but I believe he meant it," Mr. Budzanowski said with a chuckle.
He was one of 11 foreigners taken hostage by Palestinian gunmen on Tuesday after the Israeli army attacked a prison in the West Bank city of Jericho, eventually capturing militant leader Ahmed Saadat and five other wanted men who had been in Palestinian custody. All the foreign hostages have since been released.
Mr. Budzanowski's captors, members of the leftist PFLP, which Mr. Saadat leads, had been looking for an American or British hostage, someone they could potentially use as barter to get Israel to stop its attack on the jail.
Under a complicated international agreement, U.S. and British monitors had been stationed at the prison since 2002 as guarantors of Mr. Saadat's sentence, but left their posts just minutes before the Israeli tanks and bulldozers arrived. The short period of time between the departure of the monitors and the arrival of the Israeli military sparked charges of collusion and a wave of anti-foreigner anger across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Gunmen wearing masks and military fatigues burst into the Gaza City offices of Jumpstart International, the U.S.-based humanitarian group that Mr. Budzanowski works for, shortly after the Israeli assault on the Jericho prison began Tuesday morning. Pointing Kalashnikov rifles at his chest, they blindfolded him and shoved him down stairs and into a waiting car.
Mr. Budzanowski, who could see some of what was going on despite the blindfold, says the hostage-takers then drove him at high speed through the streets of Gaza, firing in the air to get the drivers of other vehicles to get out of their way. Eventually, they ended up in the basement of a house in the neighbouring city of Khan Younis, the first of a succession of hideouts to which the broad-shouldered, bespectacled Canadian was taken. He said his captors who openly wore PFLP colours. "looked more like bikers than a militia or military unit."
At times, they changed addresses every half-hour. They forced Mr. Budzanowski to change out of the tan suit he was wearing and put on ill-fitting clothes they gave him. Later, they instructed him to put his suit back on.
