By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Non-profit organisation Gift of the Givers on Sunday announced the unconditional release of South African Gerco van Deventer, who was taken hostage in Libya six years ago.
He was taken hostage in Libya on Friday, 3 November 2017, sold to Al-Qaeda in Mali in 2018.
Van Deventer was the longest held South African hostage in captivity.
Gift of the Givers said that Algeria’s security agencies had taken Van Deventer to hospital for a check-up following his release.
“We await the next step on his health and arrangements to bring him home to be reunited with wife Shereen and son Asher. It has been six agonising years of prayer, patience, and hope,” the charity said in a Facebook post.
Van Deventer was an emergency paramedic who was working for a security company when he was seized on 3 November 2017, while on his way to a power plant construction site around 1,000km (600 miles) south of Libya’s capital Tripoli.
Three Turkish engineers who were abducted with him were freed about seven months later, but he remained in captivity.
In March his family made a fresh plea for his release.
Gift of the Givers has been involved in previous efforts to free Van Deventer and other hostages held in the Sahel region.
The charity said the al-Qaeda affiliate, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, had asked for a ransom of $3m (£2.4m) in 2018, and the charity negotiated the amount down to $500,000.
However, Van Deventer’s family and employer could not afford the amount, and the militants finally released him “unconditionally” on Saturday, it added.
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and other extremist groups in North and West Africa have long used kidnapping for ransom as a way of raising money.
The group, which has its roots in Algeria’s bitter civil war in the 1990s, operates across the Sahel region south of the Sahara Desert and within Mali and Burkina Faso.