Foreign Correspondent Margot Kiser
Letters to Annie from Kaftanistan
Aid Workers’ Pirate Nightmare Oct 27, 2011 11:27 AM EDT A U.S. aid worker and her Danish counterpart are still missing in Somalia after being kidnapped by Al-Shabab, an al Qaeda affiliate. Margot Kiser on the pair’s tale of betrayal and violence. After they finished their workshop on land-mine hazard reduction early Tuesday afternoon, the […]
Pirates In Paradise Oct 17, 2011 1:00 AM EDT Somalia’s deadly chaos is spreading across the border into Kenya, where dry land is no longer a refuge from the hostage takers who infest the failed state to the north. David and Judith Tebbutt planned to wrap up their Kenya vacation in style. After a week […]
The first incident — the murder and kidnapping at Kiwayu — was alone brazen enough to seem a declaration of war. As weeks passed it seemed as though that might have been a one-off, an isolated crime of opportunity. Not the handiwork of pirates. Just thugs. Maybe even just local thugs. Then there was Marie […]
I first saw Marie a couple of years ago during a morning walk down Shela beach. Maybe twenty yards (I’m terrible at assessing distances) from the shore is a sandbar; the channel between the beach and the sand bar is farther than you think and a powerful tidal current surges below. At the northern tip […]
Ten heavily armed gunman reportedly stormed the beach near Lamu island in Kenya early this morning, firing shots, and abducting an handicapped Frenchwoman from her sea front grass hut. According to Lamu police, the gunmen and their hostage “went out into the open sea”. Around 2 AM, residents of Shella, a small European enclave near […]
