New calls to free South African hostage held in Mali
The family of a South African held hostage by jihadists in Mali for over five years launched a fresh appeal for his release Saturday, just days after a French journalist was freed.
Gerco van Deventer, 47, was kidnapped in Libya on November 3, 2017 on his way to a power plant construction site around 1,000 kilometres south of the capital Tripoli.
Three other Turkish engineers seized at the same time were freed seven months later, but Van Deventer remained in captivity and was moved to Mali.
"I'm launching a fresh appeal... we desperately need him home," his wife Shereen van Deventer, told AFP in an online interview.
"He's a father of three children," she added, referring to their children aged between 12 and 18 years.
His parents, in their 80s miss him, so do his siblings, she said. "I miss him. It's time, it's been too long.
"It's a difficult situation for us as a family, we would really ask for ... their (captors') compassion to release him," she pleaded speaking from the small town of Swellendam, 220 kilometres east of Cape Town.
Van Deventer, an emergency paramedic who was working for a security company, is the only South African citizen held hostage by a non-state actor in the Sahel, according to his wife.
The fresh call for his release came after the freeing of French freelance journalist Olivier Dubois, 48, and 61-year-old American aid worker Jeffery Woodke - kidnapped in 2021 and 2016 respectively.
- 'Renewed hope' -
Shereen van Deventer, 39, said Dubois's "release certainly provides us with renewed hope for Gerco's release.
"There's that hope that there's that door being opened," she said.
In his post-release interview with Radio France Internationale (RFI), Dubois said he had spent slightly more than a year with van Deventer in captivity.
"He's in his sixth year. He doesn't deserve this, he needs to go home," Dubois said.
There was flurry of negotiations for his release during the first few years after his kidnapping, but the Covid-19 pandemic put the brakes on those efforts until early this year, said his wife.
Several people are involved in negotiations, she said, adding that the government had told her it was still trying to get her husband back home.
A spokesman for South Africa's foreign ministry told AFP: "Negotiations are still ongoing, we are trying to get him out".
- 'He's still alive' -
Imtiaz Sooliman, head of a influential South African Muslim charity, Gift of the Givers, which is also involved in mediation for his release, told AFP that a negotiator would be travelling to Mali in the next few days "to appeal to the kidnappers".
The charity helped in efforts to secure the 2017 release of Stephen McGown, another South Africa held by Al-Qaeda in Mali for nearly six years.
The family on Saturday reposted on its "Bring Gerco Home" Facebook page a video making the rounds on social media, in which van Deventer is seen pleading for release "by any means possible".
In the video van Deventer is heard saying it was recorded on March 15.
For his wife, that video was encouraging to see, as "he looks well enough".
"It makes you so relieved to know he's still alive," she added.
The Sahel has been ravaged by a jihadist campaign that began in northern Mali in 2012, sweeping over into neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger in 2015.
Kidnappings of foreigners and Malians are common.
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