Kidnap victim Judith Tebbutt 'taken to Somalia'

Judith Tebbutt, a 57 year old woman from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire, is undergoing an unimaginable ordeal. In the early hours of yesterday morning she was kidnapped while on holiday on the Kenyan coast. Her husband, David, who was 58, was shot in the chest apparently after resisting the kidnappers and his dead body was left behind. One can only assume that Mrs Tebbutt saw her husband die trying to save them both, before she was taken away by boat.

As yet, there has been no ransom demand. We must hope it comes soon, because it will be proof that the kidnappers do not want to kill Mrs Tebbutt, but make money from her safe return. She was taken 30 miles or so from Somalia, so the working assumption is that her kidnappers have taken her back to Somalia.

So who are they? One possibility is that they were Somali pirates, “chancing their arm” with a land raid, though tourists have not been targeted in this way before, and professional pirates would have done all they could to avoid killing a hostage more valuable to them alive.

The Tebbutts were the only couple staying at the Kiwayu Safari Village resort, which prided itself on security; more likely then that the kidnappers knew what they were looking for; that this was a premeditated attack, either carried out after surveillance beforehand or with inside knowledge of where the tourists were staying.

However, most Somali pirate bases are hundreds of miles further north, though this could have been the work of a pirate skiff returning home from a mission further out in the Indian ocean. 

al-Shabaab oppose piracy
Was this the Islamist Somali miliant group, al-Shabaab? They are ideologically opposed to piracy and have not taken tourists as hostages before. They rarely strike outside Somalia, and they tend to act in the name of their beliefs rather than for money.

The group earlier this year vowed to avenge the death of Osama bin Laden, but taking a British tourist over the September 11th weekend might seem a sign of weakness rather than strength – as well as signalling a new front for an organisation so far less interested in global jihad than in taking over all of Somalia.

Warning to Kenya
However, there has been fierce fighting between al-Shabaab and government forces along the Kenya-Somalia border in the last few days, and with Kenya supporting the government side, it is possible al-Shabaab could have wanted to send out a warning to Kenya that its vital tourism industry is vulnerable.
 
There is a third possibility. That this is the work of a previously unknown Somali criminal gang, exploting the power vaccum in southern Somalia to launch kidnapping raids and make money. If this is the case, Mrs Tebbutt could be freed once a ransom is paid; or she could be “sold on” to elements of al-Shabaab, who are reportedly short of money and may be minded to trade moral superiority for hard cash.