While the news has all the elements of a pot-boiler: a woman being targeted by her husband; henchmen hired by him to kill her; and the ‘victim’ coming back from the dead. All this happened in real life with Noela Rukundo
MELBOURNE: This story could well be straight out of a best-seller but it is as factual as it comes. While the news has all the elements of a pot-boiler: a woman being targeted by her husband; henchmen hired by him to kill her; and the ‘victim’ coming back from the dead. All this happened in real life with Noela Rukundo.
Rukundo, who was visiting Burundi from Australia was on her husband’s hit list, who had hired contract killers in Burundi to knock her off when she was there for her stepmother’s funeral. The men sent by Balenga Kalala, her husband, kidnapped her from her hotel, and bundled her off to an undisclosed location in a car, BBC News reported. It was here that she got to know that Kalala had hired them to murder her. However, the happy ending – or, as happy as can be expected to a saga in which a man tries to have his wife killed – was made possible by three unusually principled hit men, a helpful pastor and Rukundo herself. The henchmen did not kill her, saying they didn’t believe in killing women and children. But they would keep her husband’s money and tell him that she was dead, the henchmen added. After two days, they set her free on the side of a road, but not before giving her a mobile phone, recordings of their phone conversations with Kalala, and receipts for the $7,000 in Australian dollars they allegedly received in payment, the report said. Shaken, but alive and doggedly determined, Rukundo sought help from the Kenyan and Belgian embassies to return to Australia, according to The Age. Then she called the pastor of her church in Melbourne, she told the BBC, and explained to him what had happened. Without alerting Kalala, the pastor helped her get back home to her neighborhood near Melbourne, the news report said. Her husband, thinking that Rukundo must have been murdered by now, told relatives and friends that she died after meeting an accident in her hometown, said the UK-based news portal. Kalala, who was attending visitors who came to mourn Rukundo’s death, was surprised and shocked to see Rukundo alive as she came out of a car outside their house. Noela called the police who ordered Kalala off the premises and later obtained a court order against him. Days later, the police instructed Noela to call Kalala. Kalala made a full confession to his wife, captured on tape, begging for her forgiveness and revealing why he had ordered the murder, reported BBC. “He say he wanted to kill me because he was jealous. He think that I wanted to leave him for another man,” she later said, rejecting the accusation.
