Upon his arrival in Barcelona on the night of Thursday October 17, he was kidnapped by four armed and hooded men, a few meters from the residence where he was to stay during his stay.
“They violently put me in the back seat of a car without a license plate, which drove off at full speed towards Malaga, following the orders of the gang leader.” The chief exulted on the phone, telling his superiors “we’ve got him.”
Throughout the trip, which lasted all night from October 17 to 18 until noon, our colleague imagined every possible scenario. But the one that came up most often and with the most insistence was that of forced repatriation to Algeria, where a team of torturers was waiting to make him pay for all his journalistic work. This work was essentially devoted to denouncing the abuses of the Algerian regime, in particular the repression of all freedom of expression, corruption, looting and everything that causes chaos in a rich country.
The two kidnappers who held me were the only ones left when the Guardia Civil attacked. The rest of the group fled. My eyes were covered by a hood, I couldn’t understand what was happening, I only know that the two men who were lifting me by the legs let me go. The other two who were holding my arms started dragging me on the ground to get me away from the gendarmes. We were lying on our stomachs and I didn’t understand anything.
When I heard the voices of the gendarmes, I removed the tape that covered my mouth, I lifted the hood and I saw the Senegalese. I asked him what was happening. He replied: “Pirates”. I started thinking and decided that I preferred pirates to hijackers.
Before I could scream, the Guardia Civil ordered us to stand and raise our hands. I then shouted “hostage, hostage” and showed them my tied hands so they would understand that I couldn’t get up. They saw that my chest was bare and my pants were full of mud. They handcuffed the two hostage-takers on the ground, then one of them helped me get up before untying him further.
All his escape attempts failed miserably and he had to rely on God, hoping for a miracle to abort the criminal operation set up by a terrorist organization based in the south of Spain and used by the Algerian secret services. to capture 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 happened. As four terrorists prepare to take their hostage onto a river boat, their heads and eyes covered with hoods, their wrists firmly tied and their mouths tightly taped, a squadron of Guardia Civil vehicles suddenly arrives on the scene. .
The terrorists started running away. Of the group, there remains only a Senegalese and a North African who hold Hichem Aboud by the arms. They are finally arrested by members of the Spanish security services. This is the end of the nightmare for our colleague who received the necessary care at the city’s civil hospital before the security and legal procedures of the investigation began, the first elements of which revealed the shameful agreement made between a state that claims to be respectable and an international terrorist organization made up of mercenaries of different nationalities to transport drugs and protect the movements of drug traffickers.
At the end of his ordeal, Hichem Aboud, moved, declared that he “could not find the words to express his gratitude to the Spanish Guardia Civil and, in particular, to the members of the Lebrija brigade”.
He added that his lawyer, “Essakali Abdeljalil will soon intervene with the head of the Spanish government to denounce this hostile act of the Algerian regime which used the services of a terrorist organization on Iberian soil to organize the kidnapping of a peaceful journalist.”
The editorial staff of Atalayar, which stood in solidarity with its journalist throughout his disappearance, welcomes this happy outcome of a painful and atrocious ordeal. But all’s well that ends well.
