Upon his arrival in Barcelona on the night of Thursday, October 17, he was kidnapped by four armed men wearing balaclavas, a few meters from the residence where he was supposed to stay during his stay.
“I was violently put into the back seat of a car without a license plate, which started at full speed in the direction of Malaga, following the orders of the head of the gang”. The gang boss was exultantly on the phone, telling his superiors “we got him.”
During the entire journey, which lasted all night from October 17 to 18 and until noon, our colleague imagined all possible scenarios. But the one that came up most frequently and insistently was that of a forced repatriation to Algeria, where a team of torturers was waiting for him to make him pay for all his journalistic work. An activity dedicated, essentially, to denounce the abuses of the Algerian regime, in particular, the repression of all freedom of expression, corruption, rapine and everything else that has caused chaos in a rich country.
Hichem Aboud
All his escape attempts failed miserably, and he had to trust in God, hoping for a miracle that would abort the criminal operation mounted by a terrorist organization based in the south of Spain and used by the Algerian secret services to capture the journalist Hichem Aboud. A first in the annals of the African and Maghreb press.
On the banks of a river, in Lebrija, a village located about fifty kilometers from the city of Seville, the miracle finally occurred. Just as four terrorists were about to put their hostage on a river boat, his head and eyes covered by a balaclava, his wrists tightly bound and his mouth tightly taped, suddenly, a squad of Civil Guard vehicles arrived at the scene.
The terrorists began to flee in a stampede. There were only one Senegalese and one Moroccan left of the group, who were holding Hichem Aboud by the arms. They were eventually arrested by members of the Spanish security services. This was the end of the nightmare for our colleague, who received the necessary treatment in the civil hospital of the city before the security and judicial procedures of the investigation began, the first elements of which revealed the shameful agreement reached between a State that pretends to be respectable and an international terrorist organization formed by mercenaries of different nationalities to transport drugs and protect the movements of drug traffickers.
At the end of his ordeal, an emotional Hichem Aboud declared that he “could not find words to express my gratitude to the Spanish Civil Guard and, in particular, to the members of the Lebrija brigade.”
He added that his lawyer, “Essakali Abdeljalil, will soon address the head of the Spanish government to denounce this hostile act of the Algerian regime, which has resorted to the services of a terrorist organization on Iberian soil to organize the kidnapping of a peaceful journalist.”
The Atalayar editorial office, which has been in solidarity with its journalist throughout his disappearance, congratulates itself on this happy ending of a painful and atrocious ordeal. But all’s well that ends well.