The doctor taken by Al Qaeda and kept prisoner for 7 years in Africa | Foreign Correspondent

VOICEOVER: The Saharan desert. No-man's-land. Death is always close. This is the perfect place to keep captives. My name is Elliott, Kenneth Arthur. I'm aged 82. I am Australian, uh, by birth. JONATHAN HOLMES: This slick propaganda video was made by Islamist extremists who owed allegiance to al-Qaeda. In 2016, they kidnapped Dr Ken Elliott and his wife, Jocelyn, from the hospital they'd been running in West Africa. Within three weeks, Jocelyn was released. But Ken was not. Soon afterwards, I travelled to Burkina Faso for Foreign Correspondent. It's probably the first time in my career that I've driven through an apparently peaceful country with an escort of heavily armed paramilitary police. But at the last minute, the family expressed concern that that story might endanger Ken Elliott's release, or even his life. So, it never went to air. For another seven years, he would be kept in gruelling captivity in the Sahara Desert. Then, last year, at the age of 88, he was quietly released. He returned home to Jocelyn in Perth. Ken, Jocelyn, hi. Jonathan. Welcome to Perth. Thank you. They have never talked to anyone in the media about what happened... So, um, we're gonna have a chat. Yeah. ..until now. There was a knock on the door and Ken went to the door. Four people with AK-47s. They were all crouched right down, and I thought they looked pretty scared, but they were in by that time. They just came straight through the door? Yeah. Pulled us out. We didn't have any, uh...any option but to...to go along with them. The news broke in Australia on the morning of Sunday, the 17th of January, 2016. An elderly Australian couple have been kidnapped by al-Qaeda-linked militants in Burkina Faso. An Australian doctor and his wife are believed to have been kidnapped by jihadists. The Burkina Government said the pair were kidnapped near the West African country's borders with Niger and Mali. For over 40 years, the Elliotts had lived in Burkina Faso, a landlocked West African country in the region known as the Sahel. To the north, in the true desert of northern Mali and Niger, Islamist militants have been active for 20 years. (SINGING IN ARABIC) For most of that time, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb had specialised in kidnapping Westerners for ransom. The West African director of Human Rights Watch at the time, Corinne Dufka, knew their methods all too well. They used kidnapping as a key source of financing, to sustain and grow their organisations. They kidnapped people in the extractive industry. They kidnapped religious workers, government officials, United Nations officials, to negotiate usually quite large ransoms. (GUNFIRE) The ransoms were mostly paid covertly by European governments. The money was used to buy weapons, provisions, vehicles and petrol. Gradually, the jihadis fought their way south, against the Malian army, UN forces and the French. But up until the end of 2015, Burkina Faso had been relatively immune from attack. The incidents of January 2016 announced loud and clear to the Sahel, to Africa and to the world that the Islamist dynamic had come to Burkina Faso with devastating effect. (GUNFIRE) On the same night that the Elliotts were kidnapped, the self-styled jihadists struck with full force in the heart of Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou. Well into the morning, there was a full-scale gun battle going on in the main street. (GUNFIRE NEARBY) When I arrived in the city, the evidence of the attack was still plain to see. The early press reports described an attack on the Hotel Splendide, and as you can see, there's repairs going on. There was shooting there. There were people wounded. But by the time the security forces arrived and chased the jihadists into that hotel, the real carnage had already occurred, not on that side of the street, but here, at the Cafe Cappuccino, one of the most popular eating spots for the expat community in Ouagadougou. There was a fire raging inside, there were cars burning outside, and its terrace was literally awash with blood. The Cappuccino's barman, Clement Djiguembi, spent several hours cowering inside the cafe's toilets as an al-Qaeda gunman came and went, apparently at will. (GUNFIRE) Altogether, the jihadis killed 30 people that night. 20 were foreigners, 10 were locals - mostly Muslims like Mahamadi Ouedraogo, a driver who was burned to death outside the Cafe Cappuccino. (CHANTING) It fell to his brother, Boureima, to identify the charred body. When we spoke to him two months later, he had no time for the jihadists' claim that they were acting in the name of Allah. (OVERLAPPING SHOUTING) The anguish the attack caused in Ouagadougou was matched by the outrage of the citizens of the town of Djibo, near Burkina Faso's northern border. This is where Ken and Jocelyn Elliott had lived and worked, and been abducted. But why would a whole town come out to demonstrate for the release of an Australian doctor and his wife. To find the answer to that question, we travelled north, from Ouagadougou to Djibo. Even back then, the trip was dangerous enough to justify an escort of paramilitary police. The problem isn't so much the jihadists themselves as the fact that any two-bit bandit with a Kalashnikov, and there have been plenty of those in this country, can grab you and sell you on to the jihadists over the border, in northern Mali. We arrived in the dusty little town as its daily street market was getting under way. Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world. And here, in Djibo, it shows. This is the provincial capital of the province of Soum. But here, on the main street, there's no two-storey buildings and apart from the ubiquitous mopeds and the occasional car or truck, there's precious little that belongs to the 20th century, let alone the 21st. When, 45 years ago, the Elliotts came looking for a place where poor people needed the medical help they felt it was their Christian duty to provide, when they got to Djibo, they knew they'd found it. KEN ELLIOTT: Oh, we'd had that idea for a long time. Australia was packed out with doctors, more or less - at least it seemed to us. And there was just nothing over there. We saw that there was a really great need, mainly for surgery. Uh, medicine was being handled somewhat in dispensaries, but surgery was almost non-existent. And, so, gradually, over years, they built a hospital. It was a simple enough facility. There were no beds in the rooms. Patients brought their families and cooked for themselves. At its busiest, the hospital could accommodate 140 patients. KEN ELLIOTT: We had this idea that we would not ask for funds, but only pray for them - ask upwards. And we found that that system worked quite well, and it was just amazing, how we got what we needed, when we needed it. The hospital's most vital service was surgery. Surgical assistant Boureima Ganame gave me a guided tour of the once busy operating theatre. Here, in this simple room, Ken Elliott performed daily miracles. In 2012, he gave permission to supporters from America to make a short video of his work. KEN ELLIOTT: Until a short time ago, about a third of our clientele were obstetrics gynaecology, but we took only the troublesome ones - the ones that had difficulties, needed intervention of some sort. We do hernias, bladder stones, all sorts of tumours. You name it, we do it because there's nowhere else to do it - well, that is within reach. In the Elliotts' view, God provided the means. Most of the surgical equipment, for example, came as an unsolicited gift from the US ambassador of an old Cold War emergency hospital. It had lots of medical instruments, all kinds of things. Without it, we would never have been able to do what we've done. And, so, we're... we believe that the Lord knew he had that ready for us before we even came here. And God guided his hands in the theatre, too, says Ken Elliott, looking back. We'd seen what I'm going to call miracles because they were miracles. Things that, like I say, you would never see here. Just horrible cases. And...they all walked home. I mean, clearly, your motivation, both of you, was very much your Christian faith. Did you discriminate in any way about who you treated? Absolutely not. No, no, we were there to do the surgery, and, um, that's what we did. And it didn't matter who it was. No, no, that doesn't count. Family friend Abdourahman Yero was among many in Djibo who confirmed that claim to me. When I visited Djibo's high school, I got a taste of how many families had reason to be grateful to the Elliotts. (SPEAKS FRENCH) I asked how many members of the class knew a close family member who had been treated by the Elliotts. (SPEAKS FRENCH) Almost everyone put their hand up. Almost everyone had a story. And then their teacher, Mr Lingani, chimed in. Over the years, there were volunteers - from North America, from Australia, from Europe - who would give months or even years of their time to help out at the hospital. But the heat, the isolation and the unremitting work were hard to take. Ken Elliott was hoping to find someone who would take over his burden. We're really getting on a little bit in years, and, uh, we... we'd really like people that would like to make it their work. But it wasn't old age that forced the Elliotts to abandon their patients. It was those four visitors armed with Kalashnikovs, who knocked on the door of their modest house behind the hospital. They were all crouched right down, and I thought they looked pretty scared, but, uh, they were in by that time. They just came straight through the door? Mm. Yeah. Pulled us out. They'd sort of make your head go down like this and they took me across to where there was a waiting car on the other side of our... our wire fence, and they bundled me across the top of the fence. And then we were bundled into the back of a Toyota. We didn't have any...any option but to...to go along with them. So, did you know what was happening to you, who these people were? Uh, well, we presumed that they were probably jihadists, but, uh, we didn't really know. But in the following days, as news of the protests in Djibo filtered through to them in the desert, the Elliotts became anxious. We thought that perhaps we might be too hot to hold and that they would dispose of us. After a while there, Jocelyn said, "I think they're gonna do it, Dad." (CHUCKLES) I said, "What do you mean?" And, uh... Well, they were getting out guns out of one of the vehicles over there. And then a bloke came over and got a gun out of a vehicle near where we were. I thought, "Well, yeah, she's probably right." But it turned out they weren't gonna dispose of us at that stage. Might have saved a lot of trouble if they had, wouldn't it? In fact, says Jocelyn, except for that one scare, she never felt threatened. We were treated with respect, I think, because of our age. People didn't push us around or anything like that. No physical maltreatment? No, not at all. And then, three weeks after seizing them, their captors announced that they were going to release Jocelyn Elliott. Yes. Well, that was a... a bit of a surprise. And she says, uh, "Well, what about him?" You know? And, uh, they said, "Well, no, he stays "because we've got people that are being held, too." And, so, she said, "Well, if he can't go, I'm not going." And it was very interesting, the way they reacted to that. You know, they looked at each other and they looked at each other. And... (LAUGHS) I don't think they'd ever been confronted by a woman before, like that. However, we discussed it, that, you know, she had to go because she was the only one that knew anything about what had happened and what was going on at the hospital. What were your feelings, Jocelyn? Oh... Very surprised, that's for sure. Yeah. But, there again, you know, we're in the hand of the Lord. And, so, that's... you know, gave...gave me peace. And I knew that the Lord had a... he could organise things. You know, he'd already organised this...completely unexpected thing. Did you think, at the time, that the Lord would organise that you wouldn't see Ken again for another seven years? No, no, no, I didn't think that at all. No. Jocelyn was released in Niger. She stopped briefly in Burkina Faso, on her way to London. CORINNE DUFKA: You know, it's really hard to know why they did release Dr Elliott's wife, because it's not like al-Qaeda doesn't kidnap women. Since then, they have kidnapped numerous women who worked in mining companies, nuns, aid workers. So...so, I don't necessarily think it was because she was a woman. So, it may well have been a result of some of the pressure by Djibo or Burkina Faso elders. But his kidnappers showed no inclination to release Ken Elliott. For over seven years, he was moved from camp to camp in the vast Saharan wilderness. KEN ELLIOTT: We didn't really know where we were. We were just with them. And, so...and that was true for all the years that I was with them. At least for most of that time, Ken Elliott had company. Hello, my name is, uh, Iulian Ghergut. I am from Romania. I've been captured in the Burkina Faso on the 4th of April, 2015. Iulian Ghergut was a security guard at a manganese mine quite close to Djibo when he was captured. He shared the 2017 proof-of-life video with Ken Elliott, and most of their long captivity, too. When I met up with him, he'd been in captivity for nine months and I thought, "How could anybody put up with this for nine months, you know?" I ended up being there for seven years and four months. Give us an idea of the day-to-day existence that you led. Well, 'existence' is the right word, I think, because...we had nothing to read, we had nothing to listen to. We had nothing to do, basically. It was a very flat sort of life. Iulian and I used to chat quite a lot, but we wore that out too, and we were somewhat different, anyway. But I was thankful for him and I hope he was thankful for me. They lived and slept mostly in crude shelters, with a single blanket each. For fear they might be spotted by surveillance drones, they were rarely allowed out of them, even in daytime. What sort of food did you have? Macaroni in the morning. Boiled macaroni. On its own? Sometimes, there'd be little bits of meat in it, a bit of tinned tomato, and maybe a bit of salt. (CHUCKLES) But that's the morning meal. The macaroni. Midday, we'd have homemade bread, which was made... cooked in the sand, hot sand. And several of them would pull it all apart, into little postage stamps, and, uh, that would be put in with water. Soggy bread. Yeah, that was what we called it. Soggy bread. (LAUGHS) In the evening, they all had rice. I began having rice, but then I had trouble with swallowing it because it got hung up in the oesophagus, you know? And boiled rice is a bit sticky. I had a couple of very, very bad experiences with that and I had to give up having rice. So, did you have anything in the evening? No, not really, but it didn't matter because I... ..didn't want to get fat. Ken didn't get fat, but his appalling diet did make him seriously ill. In all my medical career, I'd never seen a case of scurvy. But, uh, I saw it then, and I really had a very bad scurvy. But I couldn't walk. I couldn't even crawl, at one stage, by the time... How does it affect your ability to walk? Mostly, I think it was because I bled a lot into...into my muscles, into my tissues. My legs were... And I couldn't straighten my legs out. Did they swell up or...? Yeah. Yeah. And, so, I could go on hands and...hands and knees. How long did this go on for, that you couldn't walk? Oh, quite a long time, I think. Quite...quite many months. Many months? Mm-hm. I'd been asking for vitamin C, but they said that they couldn't find any anywhere. And then, one day, we had a visit from a fairly senior fellow... ..that we'd...had met with before, and he came up...down to me, where I was sitting under a tree, and he said he wanted to see my legs. So, I showed him my legs. Uh, "Mm." And disappeared. And then, the next morning, I had... ..was it five different brands of vitamin C sitting alongside me? And, uh, that turned it right around. There were plenty of other health hazards for an old man living without shelter in the Sahara Desert. Heatstroke during the day... ..bitter cold at night... ..eye damage from sandstorms and a hazard that might be living under every rock and stone. Yes, I think one of the major ones were scorpions. (LAUGHS) Scorpions is nothing to laugh at, is it? No, it isn't, actually, no. I'd had a couple before I went out to the desert, but I had about 20 or 21 out there. What's the aftermath of a scorpion sting? Pain. (LAUGHS) And lots of it. Yes. Um, most of them I had on the hand, inevitably. And, uh, when you get a scorpion sting, it just gets worse and worse, and it goes up your arm, into your shoulder. The last... one of the last ones I got was, I think, a different variety, and it went right up... to my shoulder and then went across to the other shoulder and then went down to that hand. How long did that pain last? Oh, they usually last a couple of days. And that happened 20 times? Well, they weren't all as bad as each other. That one was a particularly bad one, and I think it must have been a different species. I believe, in the north of Africa, they do have ones that can be often fatal. And I think this must have been pretty...a close relative of those. (SINGING IN ARABIC) (GUNFIRE) Meanwhile, unknown to Ken Elliott, his captors were taking over more and more of his adopted country, Burkina Faso. Numerous al-Qaeda-linked factions united under a single banner.. ..and fought their way south, from Mali. (CHANTING IN ARABIC) Across the border, in Burkina Faso, they met and sometimes fought with the jihadis of Islamic State Sahel, a smaller but even more violent group of Islamist militants. And if the jihadis have been ruthless, the government forces opposing them have been as bad or worse. MAN: Allahu akbar! Could any journalist today travel from Ouagadougou to Djibo with an escort of half a dozen gendarmes, as I did eight years ago? CORINNE DUFKA: Absolutely not, if you wanted to come out alive. Djibo and the northern Sahel district of Burkina Faso is ground zero to the abuses. I, myself, whilst I was with Human Rights Watch, documented hundreds of killings - indeed, over the years, thousands of...of killings - both by the...the terrorist groups but especially by the army and now the civil defence militias and counterterrorism operations. As recently as December of 2023, there was a devastating terrorist attack on Djibo that killed scores of soldiers and many civilians as well. And in response to that, we understand the security forces organised a major offensive a few weeks later, and went village to village to village, massacring anyone that they found in six or seven villages right around Djibo. In Djibo, the big event of the week in 2016 was the livestock market. (LOUD BLEATING) Traders came from as far as the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Ghana to buy cattle, sheep and goats. Nobody comes anymore. The roads have been cut. Animals and people in Djibo have been starving for two years. CORINNE DUFKA: These jihadist groups have instituted a crushing embargo of the town, so that civilians living there couldn't get any food in or out. So, the civilians in Djibo being particularly badly hit by...by both sides, and are suffering tremendously. In the suburbs of Perth, Jocelyn Elliott waited and prayed. It was a year and a half before she heard directly from her husband. Thank you particularly to my wife and children and grandchildren for their concern and prayers and love. And I pray that God will bless all of you abundantly. JOCELYN ELLIOTT: We were greatly comforted to see him there and speaking, and the thing I remember about it was that he said he thanked us for our love, and I just wondered whether or not he'd received any of the letters that we'd tried... been sending and... He hadn't. But he had received instructions from the video-makers that there were things he had to say. This video is to ask various governments, in particular the Australian Government and Burkina Government, uh... ..to do what they can to, um... ..help, uh, negotiate my release. It looked as though Ken Elliott was asking for the Australian Government to pay a ransom for his release. But Jocelyn wasn't fooled. To me, it was a propaganda system, you know, that they made. Can you tell us how you got on with the Australian Government? I mean, were they trying to help? Very definitely. The Australian Government were always in contact with us and, uh, they did a wonderful job. And I'm just very thankful for what they did, that's for sure. Of course, they have this very firm policy of not paying ransoms in these situations. And we felt the same way. We felt that it would just encourage more hostage-taking in Africa, in Burkina and wherever - expatriates or local people. It was just encouraging this sort of, uh, situation. How about you, Ken? You were sitting there for seven years. Did you hope some...somebody would pay a ransom for you at some point? Absolutely not. And I said to Jocelyn, when we had our discussion just before she left, that, you know, I did not want a ransom. I wasn't sure about the prisoner exchange, but certainly no ransom. And I didn't expect one, either. And, so, Ken's existence continued, night after day, month after month, year after year. He had nothing to do and, other than Iulian Ghergut, he had no one to talk to, not even his guards. In the beginning, I could talk to a few of them because a few of them could speak French a little bit, but that wasn't approved of by the administration, as it were, because...I don't know why, but I guess they were afraid that we might influence their beliefs and...or even use them to make an escape, perhaps. Did you ever provide medical services to the people that were guarding you? Occasionally, there was somebody that consulted me, but, um, there's not much you can do when you don't have equipment and you don't have remedies. No, that wasn't a part of my experience. Did they try to persuade you to convert to Islam? Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. But, no, I just didn't go along with it. I wouldn't have converted, and I wouldn't pretend to. But the Lord's been good to me, and I don't want to dishonour him by even pretending to be a Muslim. I mean, some people listening to that experience would say, "Well, the Lord didn't seem to be doing you any favours "for this period of your life." Did you feel, at any time, that he'd abandoned you? Never. Never. No. He didn't. No, he was...he was always there. Yeah. JONATHAN HOLMES: Ken's captors believe in a harsher god. Theirs is a holy jihad to crush the unbeliever. The armies that are fighting the jihadis have blamed their own governments for their lack of success. In the past four years, elected presidents have been replaced by military strongmen in Burkina Faso... ..in Mali...and in Niger. Western governments have made clear their disapproval, so their armies have been expelled. The last French troops left the region a year ago. The Americans are being forced to abandon a state-of-the-art drone base in Niger by this September. Their place has been taken by foreign forces less concerned about democratic niceties. Last year, interim President Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso was welcomed in St Petersburg. CORINNE DUFKA: The Russians are now, in all three of those countries, the primary military cooperation partner. These governments are intolerant of any kind of opposition. They've all postponed elections for years. In Burkina Faso, they have adopted a very worrying trend of employing civil defence militias who are ill-trained, ill-prepared and...and horrifically cruel, with hundreds of people being killed in counterterrorism operations and, of course, many by the jihadists as well. So, the situation is worsening, and worsening dramatically in Burkina Faso. And, yet, last year, even as their power was expanding in the Sahel, the jihadis suddenly decided to release Ken Elliott. KEN ELLIOTT: I had about two minutes to grab all my things and got in a car and...we're off. He was driven for days through the desert. Then under a spreading tree, they stopped. They had a drum of water on the back, two drums, I think. And they put a siphon in that and hosed me down, and they soaped me up with some shampoo. And that was most encouraging because I thought I really was on my way home, if they were gonna make me nice and pretty, and gave me clean clothes, I still didn't know where I was or where I was going, but...eventually... found my way...back here. Jocelyn, can you describe what the moment was like when you saw Ken again, after all those years? (LAUGHS) Oh, dear. Well, the one obvious thing was this rather long hair that he had, and rather long beard that he had. Oh, dear. It was lovely. The Elliotts have been assured that no ransom was paid, and no other concession made to the kidnappers. And, indeed, government sources have made clear to me that under Australian counterterrorism law, it's illegal to provide funding to terrorists, and that includes ransom payments. But the experts I've consulted are sceptical. The terrorist groups spend a tremendous amount of time and money on their hostages. They have to keep them alive, they have to move them and they have to pay their guards. You know, it's a lot of work for them, over years and years and years. And it really doesn't make sense to me that they wouldn't get something for all of their efforts. But it's also true that Dr Elliott wasn't aware of it. To Ken and Jocelyn Elliott, there's no mystery. KEN ELLIOTT: We believe that the only reason why we were released was because there were a few hundred, if not thousands, of people praying for us. And we believe in prayer. MAN: Allahu akbar. Back in 2016, in Burkina Faso, in mosques... (PRAYING) ..and in churches, they were praying for Ken Elliott's release. It took more than seven years for those prayers to be answered. They were praying for peace then, too. And they're still praying today. # Hallelujah... # PREACHER: Hallelujah! (SINGING CONTINUES) # Hallelujah (PREACHER SPEAKS FRENCH) Hallelujah. # Hallelujah # Hallelujah. #