Their love saw them through: Rachel and Paul Chandler refused to be separated after they were captured and held hostage by Somali pirates.

Fury blazed in the pirate chief’s eyes as Paul and Rachel ¬Chandler clung to one another defiantly beside their makeshift tent in the remote Somali desert.
By refusing to be separated, as he had ordered, the English hostages whom he regarded as his personal ‘prize’ had humiliated him in front of his entire gang — and now he was about to make an example of them.
Stalking off into the nearby bush, he ripped out the 4ft long root of a tree and very ¬deliberately shaved off the bark with his dagger, making it more pliable.

Then the attack began. The thug, named Bugas, flogged the couple repeatedly with his hastily-made whip, until livid red weals covered their torsos like the galley slaves of old.
The savage punishment beating was meted out on January 5 this year — a date that will haunt the Chandlers for ever.
By that time, more than two months had passed since Paul, 60, and his 56-year-old wife, from Tunbridge Wells, Kent, had been kidnapped while adventuring off the East African coast in their yacht, Lynn Rival (with which the couple were reunited yesterday).

Back then, the pirates were growing frustrated at the failure of their multi-million pound ¬ransom demand.
Foaming at the lips, the pirate chief brutally flogged us.
Convinced that all English people were ¬fabulously rich — and that the Chandlers’ family must be able to afford to pay — the gang boss had decided it was time to ratchet up the ¬pressure on the couple, making their pleas sound more plaintive when they phoned relatives to beg for deliverance.
To do so, he was determined to split them up and hold them in solitary confinement.
Having been separated once before, however, and found their nine days apart almost unbearable, this admirably stoical British couple — so devoted to one another that they have rarely been parted in 29 years of marriage — had made a pact to stay together, come what may.
Shortly before dusk, therefore, when the ¬fearsome Bugas burst into their tent, cursing and threatening them in his few words of ¬English, and demanding that they pack their bags, they refused to obey.
Instead, they wrapped their arms around each other and said, simply but very firmly: ‘No.’
The pirate boss’s response was so calculated that the Chandlers can barely contain their ¬outrage as they describe it for the first time.
‘No one ever dared to defy Bugas, especially not in front of his men, and for a few minutes there was an air of ¬disbelief,’ says Paul, recalling the incident with a precision befitting a Cambridge-educated civil engineer.
‘Then he got his AK-47 rifle and came back, and I just said: “You might as well kill us.”
‘At that point I really felt that we’d had a good life and that, though it would be very sad for our family, it would be better to die there than to be separated again.’

This naturally reserved man pauses, gazes lovingly at his wife, a former Government economist, ¬sitting close beside him on the sofa, and adds: ‘We are only half a person when we are apart. We are just made for each other.’
Her striking turquoise eyes ¬softening, his wife reaches over to squeeze his hand.
‘We were face-to-face and clinging on to each other, just thinking: “If this is the end, then this is the end,” ’ she interjects.
Continuing the story, Paul says: ‘Bugas then said: “You want to be dead?” And he put the safety catch off the gun and fired off two or three shots over our heads.
‘It wasn’t a mock execution as such, but it was starting to go along that line. It was what the pirates did from time to time when they wanted to frighten us.’
Two less resolute hostages might have fallen into line, but the ¬Chandlers remained entwined.
Their continued defiance so enraged Bugas that he began to foam at the mouth like a rabid dog, and it was then — as Paul tried vainly to shield Rachel with his body — that he flayed them with his homemade whip.
He smashed his rifle into Rachel’s face.
The blows weakened them and two guards dragged them apart, whereupon they sank down on the dirt floor. And as Paul gazed up, he witnessed one final, quite gratuitous act of callousness.
As Rachel was helpless on the ground, on all fours, the triumphal Bugas coldly raised the butt of his rifle and rammed it into her mouth — with such force that one of her front teeth was sheared off and fell into the sand.
For a short while she lay there, too numb to speak or move, before being dragged away from her ¬husband, shouting: ‘B******s! Murderers!’
Paul was in emotional turmoil. Standing barely 5ft 7in tall and now weighing just 9st 7lb (both he and Rachel lost a stone in captivity) he was powerless to defend his wife.
Yet this proud, and in some ways rather traditional Welshman could not forgive himself for ‘failing’ to protect her.
‘At first I was just angry, but the next day I felt shame,’ he says.
‘I had a serious feeling of inadequacy. I knew it was stupid because there was nothing I could do about it, but I did have some grief. I found that really painful.’

With remarkable forbearance, considering they have been free for less than a fortnight, the couple insist they do not hate all the 30 pirates in the gang that held them — and even believe one could be redeemed to lead a decent existence.
However, in an aside so completely out of character that it even appears to shock his wife, the normally ¬sanguine Paul says: ‘This one man, Bugas, I will never forget.
‘If I ever had the opportunity, I would exact revenge on him. In my fantasies I would like him to be just getting on an SAS helicopter after being captured, and I would ask to be handed a rifle butt, smash his knees and wish him a long life.’
The Chandlers have spent much of this week telling their story to the Daily Mail.
It is by turns heart-rending, nightmarish, and powerfully uplifting.
During the past year, via a succession of haunting videos cynically choreographed by the pirates to play on their family’s fears, they have become grimly familiar to us: Paul with his wispy goatee beard and dignified air of contempt for his captors; Rachel with her flame-red hair, looking more vulnerable and struggling to suppress her ¬mounting desperation.
But of course, these were merely fleeting images of two people trapped in a living nightmare that lasted 13 terrifying months.
From the very moment the couple were kidnapped in the Indian Ocean on October 23 last year, and the gang leader Bugas discovered they were British, they were seen as the gang’s passport to riches.
For in the minds of most Somalis, Britain equals easy money, and either their family or the Government would surely pay a princely sum for their release.
Thus began a tortuous war of nerves in which they and their anguished family back home ¬desperately sought to convince the pirates that the Chandlers were just ordinary people without access to the multi-million-pound spoils they were demanding.
The disturbing videos broadcast on television were not the only ¬contact Paul and Rachel had with their families.
The pirates had seized their mobile phones, which had the numbers of their loved ones saved in the address books, and ordered the couple to speak to their family on many occasions during their ¬captivity in a bid to raise the -ransom money.
To up the ante as the negotiations dragged on, Bugas, a sadistic tyrant who came to dominate their lives, played cruel mind-games.
He would wake them at dead of night and force them to move to a different bivouac or hut to disorientate them. At other times he would cock his rifle and point it at them menacingly; or simply stand right beside them and shout for up to an hour at the top of his voice into his mobile phone.
The pirates would also alarm the Chandlers with scare stories, which they never knew whether to believe

They were warned, for example, that they were in danger of being snatched by other, more ruthless pirate gangs, and the Islamic terror group, Al Shabab, which is allied to Al Qaeda.
On one occasion they were told they would be handed over to Al Shabab.
In his diary, Mr Chandler wrote that a gang member warned him that he would be shot and that his wife would be beheaded, a threat that conjured horrific images of the fate of Al Qaeda hostages such as Ken Bigley, the British expat who was abducted and beheaded by insurgents in Baghdad in 2004.
Intriguingly, several members of the group returned to camp one day claiming to have thwarted a rescue mission by ‘the British’. They boasted of killing five of our soldiers in the gun-battle.
For the Chandlers, though, the prospect of being separated was by far the most traumatic experience, as Bugas well knew.
The first time they were parted was on December 14, 2009. Having witnessed their reliance on one another, Bugas gauged this the best way to make Paul phone his family and beg them convincingly — and he was right.
‘I was very depressed,’ says Paul.
‘I was in tears and that’s something I don’t do very often. They asked me what was wrong and I said: “You have taken my wife and without her I have no life. I am nothing.”
‘It was also the uncertainty: were they going to send Rachel home? Were they going to indulge in ¬violence? It preyed on my mind — even though I knew they probably wouldn’t harm her, as she was worth more to them alive.’
They told me my wife would be beheaded.
Within a day-and-a-half of the separation, the pressure began.
Paul was handed his mobile phone and ordered to identify each person in his contacts directory then select the relatives most likely to respond to the gang’s ransom demands.
He picked out three women — his sister Jill Marshment, Rachel’s ¬sister Sarah Collett and his cousin Lynda Dolwin — and was rewarded, nine days later, by a joyful reunion with his Rachel.
It meant they were together for Christmas 2009, surreally listening to carols sung by the King’s College choir on a crackling short-wave radio which they were occasionally permitted to use, tears streaking their cheeks.
The pirates’ spokesman claimed they would be given a ‘special’ Christmas lunch, including chips.
In reality, they munched a bag of walnuts given to them by the skipper of the Kota Wajar, a hijacked container ship they had spent some time on earlier in their ordeal, and squirrelled away for the occasion. But at least they were together.
Just nine days later, however, the pirate chief was back — ¬setting about them with his tree-root whip.
This time they would be alone for 86 days, and Rachel would grow so desperate that, in her darkest moments, she contemplated taking her own life.

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Source:- Dailymail.co.uk

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