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Langan, a father of two from west London, and his interpreter were freed last Sunday
Channel 4 paid a £150,000 ransom to secure the release of a documentary film maker who was held hostage for three months after trying to make contact with Al-Qaeda’s second in command.
Sean Langan, 43, was held by criminals linked to the Taliban at a terrorist training camp in a lawless border region of Pakistan.
His kidnappers threatened to shoot the journalist and his interpreter if a ransom was not paid.
The two men, who were working for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme, were released after an Afghan go-between hired by the broadcaster delivered a briefcase full of cash to their kidnappers. The Foreign Office is believed to have warned Channel 4 against paying any money, fearing that it could inspire copy-cat abductions of westerners.
Langan’s family and the broadcaster learnt he was being held hostage eight weeks after he disappeared in March. They hired well-connected Afghan journalists to negotiate his release.
Langan, a father of two from west London, and his interpreter were freed last Sunday. The film maker is now back in Britain.
“I thought it would be a miracle if I got out of there alive,” he said this weekend. “Death was at my door every night. It makes you see your life like never before.”
Langan, who has made two previous Dispatches films in Afghanistan, lost three stone to a bout of dysentery during his time in captivity at a mountain compound in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), close to the Afghan border. He and his Afghan interpreter were kept in a darkened cell, measuring 8ft by 8ft, within earshot of a Taliban firing range.
“It was a constant barrage,” a close friend in Kabul said. “They could hear machineguns, antiaircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades going off the whole time. But they weren’t being shot in a contact [firefight] – it sounded like training.”
The two hostages were given access to a radio tuned to the BBC World Service, but this only added to their despair when they failed to hear any news about their plight. “I reasoned that if I wasn’t on the news, then no one was even looking for me,” Langan said. “And yet, bizarrely, I never gave up.”
His captors eventually made Langan call a friend in Kabul and explain that he was a hostage and that he would be killed if their demands were not met.
British intelligence was immediately called in to investigate, but sources claim that Channel 4 executives were loath to cooperate with the Foreign Office because they feared the government would try to stop them paying a ransom.
At one point MI6 officers – acting on the orders of Cobra, the top-level government security committee – raided the hotel room in Kabul where Langan stayed before the fateful assignment. They were searching for clues that they suspected Channel 4 was refusing to share.
Langan had travelled through the Khyber Pass in March to meet a group of men in Peshawar who promised to introduce him to Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan, and get him answers on video from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader.
The men claimed to be members of the Taliban, but security sources in Kabul dismissed them as “two-bit criminals” interested only in money. “They had very close links to the Taliban and they were based in a Taliban area but they weren’t the real deal,” one official said.
The men blindfolded Langan and his interpreter and drove them beyond the safety of Peshawar on March 28 to Bajaur Agency, the northernmost district of FATA, which is known to be a Taliban stronghold.
“They’d given the men their cameras to take up separately, so they could check they weren’t bugs or bombs,” a friend of Langan said, “but after three days the cameras didn’t show up and they knew something was wrong.”
Langan and his interpreter were held in a spartan cell, which had a hole in the ground for a toilet, and were brought two meals a day of bread and “stringy” meat.
Four days after their arrival at the mountain compound, they were told they had been kidnapped. “They said to my translator, ‘You are working for foreigners, so you are a spy’,” Langan said. “And they said to me, ‘You are a foreigner, so you are a spy.’ I thought we were dead for sure because the Taliban usually execute spies summarily.”
Langan’s captors are thought initially to have demanded more than £1.5m and the release of high-ranking Taliban prisoners in return for his freedom.
They apparently dropped their price after senior Taliban commanders turned on them for abducting a journalist in their name inside Pakistan at a time when the international community was heaping pressure on Islamabad to drive out insurgents.
“Sean could hear the Pakistani authorities denying the very existence of Taliban safe havens on the radio, but he could hear them training every day,” a friend said. “He was terrified his kidnappers would just kill him if it got too political and dump his body back in Afghanistan.”
Langan, who was allowed to write a journal during his ordeal, kept a candle burning at night so that he could see the face of his killer if someone entered his cell to slit his throat.
Friends said he came to terms with the idea of being shot but was afraid that he might be beheaded. He was plagued by the thought that his two sons, Luke, five, and four-year-old Gabriel, would think he had abandoned them.
Sources close to the negotiations revealed that Channel 4 agreed to pay a ransom of $300,000 (£150,000) for his freedom. Langan had refused to leave without his interpreter.
Channel 4 said: “This was a very complex and delicate negotiation and Channel 4 provided Sean’s family with support and expert advice. We don’t think it is appropriate to go into the detail of the dialogue that was necessary to secure Sean’s release. We shared information with the Foreign Office throughout this process.”
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