WATCH ABOVE: A man from Somalia was taken into custody in Ottawa, accused of abducting Amanda Lindhout in 2008.
PLEASE NOTE: This story was updated on Sunday, June 14 to include details form Amanda Lindhout’s statement on the arrest of Ali Omar Ader.
One of Amanda Lindhout‘s alleged Somali captors is now in Canadian police custody, more than five years after she was freed.
RCMP arrested 37-year-old Ali Omar Ader in Ottawa on Thursday in connection with Lindhout’s August 2008 kidnapping, after she travelled to Mogadishu with the intent to report on the country’s humanitarian crisis, and her 15-month captivity.
Mounties said Friday the arrest occurred three days after Ader arrived in the country, but did not divulge how or why he ended up in Canada nor the details of their investigation and the “techniques that lead up to his arrest.”
READ MORE: Somali man charged in Amanda Lindhout kidnapping
Lindhout, who turned 34 the same day RCMP announced the arrest, issued a statement on Sunday about Ader’s and his alleged involvement in the hostage-taking and attempts to obtain millions in ransom from her family.
“I’m grateful that this man has been arrested. I am happy that he will be called upon in court to answer for his role in the kidnapping,” she wrote. “My healing and recover, however, has never been contingent on this form of justice.”
READ MORE: Amanda Lindhout responds to charges against her alleged captor
Lindhout has previously said she has compassion for the “soldier boys” who held her hostage.
“It’s pretty clear my captors were products of war and certainly had been shaped by that. Having that understanding helped me. They’re human beings with painful stories of their own. It doesn’t make them innocent by any means, but they’re products of a culture of violence,” Lindhout has recounted.
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READ MORE: Alberta woman held hostage in Somalia reveals details of abuse, ransom in book
Somalia is and has for more than 20 years been a failed state, ruined by war, famine and lawlessness.
It gave rise to the al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group al-Shabab and a lucrative Maritime piracy industry that until recently made transit off the Horn of Africa an at-your-own-risk venture.
More than 70 per cent of Somalia’s population is under the age of 30, according to 2012 statistics from the United Nations Development Program. Youth unemployment in the troubled country is among the highest in the world, as 67 per cent of people between the ages of 14 to 29 don’t have work according to the 2012 statistics.
With no opportunity and little hope for any sort of prosperity in Somalia, “criminal economies, such as piracy, kidnappings and extortion, are the only option for many young people in a country so rife with impunity as Somalia, said Samantha Nutt, the founder and executive director of the advocacy group War Child.
“You’re talking about an environment where people in desperate situations will often make extremely desperate choices and where young people, in particular, will make choices that are unfortunately very destructive and anti-social and harmful,” she told Global News.
“Even if it’s not to the extent of orchestrating an international kidnapping… day to day violence and lawlessness and profiteering and racketeering are extremely common.”
Ader could be considered a product of the chaos and poverty in his country, but that doesn’t get him or anyone else involved off the hook, Nutt warned.
And even if Ader or the teenagers Lindhout said confined her were involved at a young age, that doesn’t make him or them child soldiers.
“Not every young person who grows up in a war zone, who commits a felony crime, is by definition a child soldier,” she said. “There is a real distinction between young men who make choices to become criminal gangs and commit felony crimes and kids who are actually formally child soldiers.”
So prevalent is the crime and violence in Somalia that when Nutt was there with UNICEF in the mid-1990s, at a time when some 300,000 people had died from famine and war, aid agencies had to rely on security guards who were often still in their late teens.
She said when the country descended further into anarchy and aid agencies began to pull out over security fears, a lot of those young guards lost their livelihood and many of them wound up turning to criminal activity.
“Multiple generations” were affected by Somalia’s instability and even with some improvement to the security situation in parts of the country, “law and order” remains a problem.
“When war becomes so entrenched, this is the legacy we see,” Nutt said. “You see the impact of that for generations.”
Lindhout, despite what she went through, has worked to provide aid and support to women, youth and internally displaced people in Somalia through her non-profit Global Enrichment Foundation.
According to the foudation’s website, the organization “promotes peace and development in Somalia through sustainable educational and community-based empowerment programs, while undertaking humanitarian and life-saving emergency interventions in times of crisis.”
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