Scorpions, sandstorms and scurvy: How Ken Elliott survived seven years in the desert as a prisoner of Al Qaeda (original) (raw)

Imagine this: you are 82 years old, you were kidnapped by fanatical jihadists months ago, and you are somewhere in the Sahara Desert.

You have one companion, a Romanian fellow hostage, 40 years younger than you. You have nothing to read, nothing to listen to, and your guards won't speak to you.

They won't let you leave your makeshift shelter for fear you'll be spotted by French or American surveillance drones.

It is ferociously hot in the daytime, and bitterly cold at night. You have one blanket. You dig into the sand to try to make your bed more comfortable and you get bitten on the hand by a scorpion.

The pain is acute. It gets worse and worse. It travels up your arm to your shoulder. You have no painkillers, no treatment of any kind, so you wait for the pain to fade. Eventually, after two days and nights, it does.

Now imagine that day follows identical day, and night follows identical night, for seven more years. And that you get bitten by scorpions 20 more times – on one occasion, the pain travels up to your right shoulder, across to the other, and down to your left hand.

Ken Elliott and his wife Jocelyn speak with Foreign Correspondent in their Perth home. (Foreign Correspondent: Phil Hemingway)

If you are Dr Ken Elliott, recounting that last scorpion bite from a comfortable sofa in suburban Perth, you laugh.

"I believe, in the north of Africa, they do have scorpions that can be often fatal. And I think this must have been a pretty close relative of those," he says.

In 1972, Dr Elliott and his wife Jocelyn founded a hospital in the West African country of Burkina Faso. They ran it for 44 years. Ken operated on thousands of patients, from all over West Africa, charging them little or nothing.

Then, in January 2016, Ken and Jocelyn were kidnapped by Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militants. Jocelyn was released soon afterwards, but Ken was kept hostage for seven years and four months. He was quietly released last year, aged 88.

Throughout that long ordeal, and for a year afterwards, none of the family has spoken to anyone in the global media – until now.

Burkina Faso in West Africa. (Foreign Correspondent)

In his first interview since his release, Ken Elliott has told Foreign Correspondent about acute boredom interspersed with rare moments of fear; about heat-stroke, and bitter cold; sandstorms that nearly blinded him, and a diet that nearly killed him; and about his abiding faith in God, who he believes brought him safely home in the end.

'Down with Al Qaeda'

I've been trying to tell the Elliotts' story for eight years, ever since I travelled to Burkina Faso for Foreign Correspondent just weeks after they were kidnapped.

It wasn't just the abduction of an Australian doctor and his wife that persuaded us to travel to a poor, landlocked West African country on the southern fringes of the Sahara desert. It was to highlight the growing threat from Islamist militants in the entire region – especially the groups of fanatics who collectively called themselves Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

On the same night that the Elliotts were kidnapped from their home near the northern border, the Al-Qaeda militants had launched a savage attack in Burkina Faso's capital, Ouagadougou.

In the Café Cappucino, a favourite haunt of ex-pats on the main street of the city, guests were gunned down without mercy. Thirty people were killed – including 20 foreigners.

The Café Cappucino, in the capital Ouagadougou, was attacked by militants the same night as the Elliotts were captured. (Reuters: Joe Penney)

The Splendid Hotel, frequented by UN staff and western visitors to Ouagadougou, was also attacked. (Reuters: Joe Penney)

Most people I spoke to in Ouagadougou back then were outraged. "These people are not Muslims," they told me. "They are wicked."

That outrage was echoed in the town of Djibo, 200km to the north, when people discovered that their beloved Australian doctor, 81-year-old Ken Elliott, and his wife Jocelyn, had been kidnapped by Al Qaeda.

Kidnapping for ransom had been a standard fundraising ploy of the Islamists for more than a decade. Dozens of foreigners – mostly white European mining engineers, missionaries, aid-workers, or tourists – had been kidnapped and held for months or years.

Usually, in the end, European governments had covertly paid ransoms for their release. Some estimates put the kidnappers' earnings from ransoms since 2008 at well over $200 million.

But the Elliotts were not tourists, or workers for a foreign company, or visiting aid workers. They had lived and worked in Djibo for 40 years.

Ken and Jocelyn Elliott before their kidnap. (Supplied)

By the Sunday, Djibo was in uproar. Hundreds of people filled the main square, shouting "Free the Elliotts!" and "Down with Al Qaeda!"

To find out what made the Elliotts so special, cameraman Dave Martin and I made the trip from Ouagadougou to Djibo in March 2016. The roads get progressively worse as you travel north. The 200km journey took us six hours.

When the Elliotts arrived in 1972 in their well-used Landrover, with three small children and almost no money, it would have taken far longer.

'He was like a machine'

Burkina Faso is one of the poorest countries in the world, and in Djibo, it shows. It's the capital of the province of Soum, but there are no two-storey buildings, no private cars, few bitumen streets, and a lot of donkeys. It is hot, dusty and remote.

More to the point, from the Elliotts' point of view, there was no hospital, and especially no surgeon.

Devout Christians both, they agreed when they married that God's purpose for them would not be fulfilled if Ken's medical skills were exercised in Australia.

"Australia was packed out with doctors more or less, at least it seemed to us," says Ken.

So they answered the call for a doctor from a Christian mission in Benin. They stayed for four years, then went looking for somewhere to start their own clinic. They went to Timbuktu, and travelled down the Niger River. They settled on Djibo, and gradually, over the years, they built a hospital there.

Most such enterprises are consumed with the need to raise funds. Not Ken and Jocelyn Elliott.

"We had this idea that we would not ask for funds but only pray for them, up there," Ken tells Foreign Correspondent, pointing towards the ceiling.

That "system", as he calls it, worked. "It was just amazing how we got what we needed when we needed it."

Children in Djibo, Burkina Faso. (Supplied: GBSI)

Ken and Jocelyn's hospital in Djibo. (Supplied: GBSI)

Their surgical equipment, and much else besides, came from the gift of an unused Cold War emergency hospital that the American ambassador gave them as an unsolicited gift. Friends, relatives, strangers, churches in countries they had never visited, came through with donations.

The hospital I visited was stark and unadorned. There were no beds, because their patients were used to the floor, and in the heat preferred to sleep outside. Volunteers from Europe, North America and Australia came for a few months, or even years. Jocelyn raised and educated their children. Ken became a full-time surgeon.

Obstetrics – "only the complicated cases that needed intervention" – hernias, cysts and tumours, broken bones, Dr Elliott did them all. He was his own anaesthetist.

On my 2016 visit, Ken's surgical assistant, Boureima Ganamé, took me round the simple theatre.

"Sometimes we would do eight operations between 8am and 2pm," he told me. "Even when he was 80 years old, when he got into the theatre, he was like a machine."

Ken Elliot performs surgery in his hospital in Djibo. (Supplied: GBSI)

A friendly greeting with a local. (Supplied: GBSI)

Patients came from all over Burkina Faso; from Mali and Niger, from the Ivory Coast and Benin – and of course, from Djibo itself. The majority were Muslim.

"He never mixed religion and his work," family friend Abdurahman Yéro told me. "Whether you are Christian, or Muslim, or without religion, it didn't matter to him. You come along, you are a human being, you get treatment. He didn't care about the rest."

When I visited the high school and asked the kids to raise their hand if they or a family member had been treated by Dr Elliott, almost every hand in the room went up.

"He saved my life," said one. "He saved my vision," said another.

Their teacher, Mr Lingani, told us that he had personally led his class out onto the streets to join the protest the day after the Elliotts were kidnapped.

So that was the story we came back to Australia with in 2016. The family had refused to be interviewed, or even to speak to us on the phone. But we believed they had been happy enough for us to go to Djibo.

But now, at the prompting of the Australian government, they intervened. They told the ABC that they did not support the program. They were concerned it might affect negotiations for Ken's release.

So the program did not go to air. And for the next seven years the Australian public heard next to nothing about Ken Elliott. A video released by his captors in 2017 featured him and five other hostages. And that was all. Year after year, the family maintained their silence. No interviews. Please don't air the program. Thank you.

Then, in May 2023, Ken Elliott was quietly released. He was 88. He returned to Perth, which he had left in the mid-1960s. And finally, in early 2024, we heard from the family spokesman that Ken and Jocelyn had watched our original report, wanted it to go to air, and would talk to us about their experiences – the first time they had talked to anyone in the media, anywhere in the world.

Sandstorms, scurvy and 'soggy bread'

And so, in a rented house in Perth, I talked to Ken and Jocelyn Elliott. They described how four men armed with Kalashnikovs had knocked on their door during an electricity blackout on the evening of January 15, 2016, and pushed their way inside.

"We had no alternative but to go along with them," says Ken. They were driven in a ute into the bush.

After Jocelyn was released, Ken was driven far to the north through the desert. For most of that time, he was with a fellow hostage, a Romanian called Julian Ghergut, who had been a security guard at a manganese mine in Burkina Faso when he was kidnapped.

"When I met him," says Ken, "he had been a captive for nine months. 'How can anyone stand this for nine months?' I asked myself. I ended up being there for seven years and four months." And he smiles ruefully.

Ken and Jocelyn are now living in Perth after four decades in Burkina Faso. (Foreign Correspondent: Phil Hemingway)

Ghergut was eventually released a few months after Ken in 2023. There was a 40-year age gap between them, and they were very different people.

"But I was grateful to him," says Ken, "and I hope he was grateful to me."

On one occasion at least, Julian Ghergut may have saved his life. Ken was out in the desert, answering a call of nature, when a sandstorm blew up. Soon he couldn't see his own hand in front of his face. He was guided back to the camp by Julian bashing a tin plate with a spoon. Without shelter, Ken might easily have been buried alive.

There were other hazards, apart from sandstorms, scorpions and boredom. The diet was appalling. Boiled macaroni for breakfast; damper torn into pieces and soaked in water – "soggy bread," Ken calls it – for lunch. And sticky rice, which Ken couldn't eat, for dinner. No fruit. No vegetables. The occasional bit of meat when a sheep was slaughtered.

After a while on this diet, Ken contracted scurvy, the disease that struck down so many pre-modern sailors, and that Captain Cook famously warded off with pickled cabbage. It has many symptoms, one of them internal bleeding into the muscles of the legs.

Ken's legs swelled up. For months, he couldn't walk. He could barely crawl. His captors said they couldn't find any vitamin C.

Eventually, one of the "bosses", as Ken calls them, turned up and looked at his legs. The next morning he found five different brands of Vitamin C by his sleeping place. "That turned things around pretty quickly."

His captors showed no interest in using Ken's medical skills. Some of them were profoundly sceptical about Western medicine anyway.

"Muslims don't get sick," one of them pronounced – which after decades of treating sick Muslims in Djibo, came as news to Ken Elliott.

Of course, they tried to convert him. But Ken was adamant: "The Lord has been good to me. There's no way I was going to dishonour Him by converting to Islam. Or even pretending to convert."

"Well, some might say that the Lord hadn't been doing you any favours for this period of your life," I put to him. "Didn't you ever feel that God had abandoned you?"

Quiet conviction: "Never. No. He was always there."

The mystery behind Ken's release

The Elliotts have been assured by the Australian government that no ransom was paid and no other benefit bartered to the kidnappers for his liberty. They agree with the government's policy of not paying ransoms.

"That would just encourage more hostage-taking all over Africa, expatriates or local people," says Jocelyn. And Ken confirms that he told Jocelyn before she left him that he didn't want anyone to pay a ransom for him. "Absolutely not."

But experts I've consulted are sceptical. The jihadists are not known for their beneficence. They must have got something in return for Ken's release, they believe.

Probably not a ransom; a complex multi-government deal involving the release of Islamist prisoners is more likely – though the Australian government is giving nothing away.

A bearded Ken Elliott with Jocelyn shortly after his release. (Supplied)

For the Elliotts, there's no mystery.

"We believe that the only reason why we were released," says Ken, "was because there were a few hundreds, if not thousands of people praying for it. And we believe in prayer."

But for the people of Burkina Faso, there have been no miracles. Ever since that fateful day in January 2016 when Ouagadougou was attacked and the Elliotts were kidnapped, they've seen a downward slide into anarchy.

The government has lost control of half the country to rival Islamist groups. The town of Djibo is effectively besieged. The conflict between jihadists, the army, and a murderous civil militia is costing thousands of civilian lives every year.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger are all now under the control of military strongmen, who have kicked out their elected governments, and the French and American military. All three have welcomed Russian mercenaries instead.

Back in 2016, we filmed both Christians and Muslims praying for the release of Dr Elliott. After more than seven years, that prayer, miraculously, was answered.

But they were praying for peace then too. And they are still praying today.

Watch Kidnapped By Al Qaeda on Foreign Correspondent at 8pm on ABC TV, ABC iview and the ABC In-Depth YouTube channel.