Redondo Beach journalist Michael Scott Moore freed after held captive for two years by Somali kidnappers
Journalist Michael Scott Moore was freed last month after being held captive in Somalia for almost three years by armed abductors.
Moore, 45, who grew up in Redondo Beach and graduated from Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach, had traveled to Somalia to report on Somali pirates in preparation for a book on the subject. Friends say Moore is in good health, and he is currently keeping a low profile, recuperating at his apartment in Berlin.
“I am just overjoyed,” Moore’s mother and Redondo Beach resident Marlis Saunders told Los Angeles Times after his freeing. “I am ecstatic.”
Charles Hawley, deputy editor of Spiegel International, the news magazine that Moore worked for as a freelancer just before his kidnapping, has spoken to Moore once since his freeing.
“He is doing quite well, all things considered,” Hawley said. “His physical health is good, and he seems to be in good spirits. His sense of humor seems to be intact….He said that the conditions that he was held in were okay. He was in pretty good shape when he came out.”
Negotiators, who remained anonymous for reasons of confidentiality, paid a $1.6 million ransom to free Moore, according to the Associated Press.
“In Somalia nobody gets out for free,” said Robert Young Pelton, the editor and creator of the Somalia Report, a news service that works with over 140 Somali journalists to provide news from inside the turbulent country. Pelton has tracked every person that has been kidnapped in Somalia, which at the peak of the kidnapping and piracy epidemic between 2007 and 2010 tallied to some 400 people.
The kidnapping
Moore’s kidnapping had a lot to do with bad timing.
On January 21, 2012, Moore was on his way to Kenya when he was kidnapped by the security company he had hired to drive him from his hotel to the airport in Galkayo, the capital of the north-central Mudug region of Somalia. Four days earlier, US Navy SEALs had rescued an American woman and a Danish man from the region and SEALs “had shot all the kidnappers in the head,” Pelton said.
Pelton believes Moore’s kidnapping occurred partially as retribution for the Somali casualties.
“There aren’t that many foreigners there,” he said. “When people fly there, they know the plane….Everybody knows when foreigners are in town.”
According to Pelton, almost all pirate activity and kidnapping occurs in the state of Galmadug, the government of which has first-hand knowledge of criminal activities. Pelton — who is in direct contact with pirate groups, militant group al-Shabaab, and the volatile government on a regular basis — talked to Moore’s kidnappers on June 4, who include Nur Ali Qoryare, the negotiator of Moore’s ransom, and 18-year-old Abdi Rashid Ali Jarer, leader of the group who held Moore captive. Journalists and nongovernmental agency workers are often targeted because kidnappers think they come with hefty insurance packages.
“He wasn’t really treated as well as other hostages,” Pelton said. “He was kept tied up, chained, inside where it was very hot. He was in a very small area.”
According to Pelton, the kidnappers were “terrified” because their colleagues had been killed by Navy SEALs. They assumed they could be attacked by airstrikes or drones at any moment, and thus hid Moore indoors and kept him confined, unlike previous circumstances in which hostages were able to walk around a ship or land. The kidnappers soon realized that Moore, a freelance writer, did not have an insurance policy and wasn’t worth much.
“The big problem the kidnappers had was no clear conduit to negotiate the individual,” Pelton said. “He had no insurance. He was writing an article about a guy and needed research on pirates. They realized he wasn’t worth money. People think journalists are worth money.”
Pirate writings
Moore is best known for writing the 2011 surf book “Sweetness and Blood: How Surfing Spread from Hawaii and California to the Rest of the World, With Some Unexpected Results”, which he promoted and discussed in Manhattan Beach in June 2011. Moore wrote a few 2012 Spiegel Online articles about a Somali pirate trial in Hamburg. Though his byline was removed by Spiegel during his captivity to make him look as unimportant as possible, the article illustrates Moore’s keen interest in Somali affairs both in the country and among its diaspora.
Hawley says Moore has plans to write a book about his nearly three years in captivity, but that for now, he is simply enjoying his free time.
Pelton has a lesson to share: “Next time you meet a nice person at an airport in Somalia to write a story about pirates, think twice.”
