Commins: Kidnap gang members wanted to kill me

ALMOST 18 months after she and a colleague were kidnapped and held for 107 days in Sudan, former GOAL worker Sharon Commins has revealed that a number of the gang wanted to kill her.

Ms Commins was kidnapped on July 3, 2009, with Hilda Kawuki by an armed gang who had forced their way into the GOAL compound in north Darfur.

“They put two guns to my head and started shouting in Arabic. We thought that we were just going to get robbed… and then we realised that it was us they were going to rob,” she tell’s RTÉ Prime Time in an interview broadcast tonight. “We were covered with blankets and there was oil in the blanket that was put onto us. My first thought that we are going to get burnt here as a sentiment to aid agencies to get out.”

She and Ms Kawuki were moved frequently so captors could avoid detection.

“Every time we were called down the mountain we didn’t know if we were going to be shot,” said Ms Commins. “There was a lot of rifts going on in the kidnapping gang — some of them wanted to kill us, others didn’t.”

Both women were held where the temperature could reach up to 50ºC.

“The guards would get quite cruel with us: they would put several containers of water around us, they would give us half a bottle of water to share between us for that day,” she said. “Just totally to intimidate us, they would say, ‘there is water there and if you touch any of it, we will kill you’.”

It was not so much the thought of dying but the effect that it would have on her family which was most frightening.

“We knew that if we did die that we would be put in the ground before sunset in line with Muslim customs,” she said. “And I think that would have been the thing that scared us the most, you know, your family never knowing how your final days ended and where your body was.”