End of hope for Isis kidnap victim's sister after body identified

Judith Buchanan, sister of Rachel Saunders, inset, who was murdered with her husband Rod. Picture: Supplied

Judith Buchanan, sister of Rachel Saunders, inset, who was murdered with her husband Rod. Picture: Supplied

Published Jun 16, 2018

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The sister of Islamic State (Isis) kidnap victim Rachel Saunders never stopped hoping she would be found alive - even though police told her three months ago they were searching for her body, which was positively identified last week.

“Before this I kept thinking, well maybe Rachel is still alive even though I knew she couldn’t possibly be,” said her older sister Judith Buchanan, 73, a Howick gun dog trainer.

“The police found so much blood in their car they said she couldn’t possibly be alive. But in my head there was still hope.

“I suppose that’s just human nature. You hope for some miracle. Well in this case, there wasn’t a miracle. There was hope, but now there is none.”

The disbelief that has permeated the last few months of Buchanan’s life began when the Hawks dropped the bombshell that British botanists Rachel, 63, and husband Rod Saunders, 74, had been abducted by Isis-linked suspects on February10 in Ngoye Forest Reserve near Mtunzini, 130km north of Durban.

“When I first heard that they had been kidnapped I couldn’t believe it. She’d been WhatsApping me the previous day about how boring filming was. I said, come on, someone is playing a horrible practical joke. People like them don’t just get kidnapped. Then gradually you realise that it’s actually true.”

That was when Buchanan’s hope began to falter.

“I started to lose hope when the ransom demand didn’t come and we never heard anything day after day.”

The day before their kidnapping, the Cape Town-based botanists, who own the indigenous seed supplier Silverhill Seeds, had just wrapped shooting in the Drakensberg mountains with award-winning BBC Gardener’s World host Nick Bailey.

On the strong recommendation of a film crew member they visited the rich biodiversity of Ngoye Forest and unwittingly stumbled into a horrific plot.

“There is an elderly couple in the forest, that it is a ‘good hunt’,” is one of the incriminating messages that have come to light in court. According to a Hawks affidavit, this message and others reveal how a botanical exploration morphed into an Isis-motivated hunt, abduction and assassination.

Another text sent by the couple’s stalker read: “When the brothers in Kenya go out and do this work it is very important that the body of the victim is never found and it remains a missing person case.”

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Buchanan. “That’s all you can say. It wasn’t as if Rod and Rachel were lured there. It just happened they drove into that forest and that man saw them and decided to take them out. It was sheer chance.

“The irony is that when tragedy struck, Rachel was being Rachel,” she added. “Always cheerful, loving life and living it to the full all over the place.”

But “if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it” - and that has changed her life.

“I no longer think certain things are important. Like all the petty fighting between people. I’m just not going to get involved in it any more.”

Making dozens of dog coats and blankets to sell and walking her golden retrievers hard for hours every day keeps Buchanan fit and on an even emotional keel, as does her new mantra of “living each day to the full”.

Buchanan is full of praise for the Hawks, who worked tirelessly to secure the arrest a mere five days after the abduction of Isis-linked suspects Sayfydeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and his wife Fatima Patel, 27.

“The Hawks were brilliant,” she said, “dedicated, committed and very compassionate. When I met the Hawks investigating officer, he said ‘We will look for Rod and Rachel until we find them.’ Which they’ve done and more.”

Patel and Del Vecchio’s home and cellphones yielded incriminating evidence about the couple’s demise but not the whereabouts of their bodies.

Neither did the arrest of a third suspect, Thembamandla Xulu, 19, for possession of the Saunders’ cellphones.

That information came to light in late March when an intensive manhunt finally netted the Hawks’ much wanted fourth suspect, Malawian Ahmad Jackson Mussa in Durban North.

He alleged that after the murders he and Patel rendezvoused with Del Vecchio driving the Saunderses’ white Toyota Land Cruiser, which was found abandoned on February 18 in Waterloo with a large amount of blood in the cargo area.

They followed Del Vecchio to the Tugela River Bridge, where he alleges they unloaded two sleeping bags containing bodies. “Accused four (Mussa) saw two heads of white people in the sleeping bags,” said a Hawks affidavit opposing bail for the suspects, who all remain behind bars. “They threw the bodies in the sleeping bags into the river.” Afterwards, Del Vecchio allegedly warned Mussa not to tell a word about the incident to anyone.

The couple’s decomposing bodies were discovered by a fisherman and taken to KwaDukuza Mortuary in Stanger, Durban by local police who did not link the grisly find to the intensive police search for the Saunderses.

Once the Hawks were alerted, mortuary strikes and forensic difficulties further delayed positive identification, first of Rod’s body at the end of April and then Rachel’s last week.

Del Vecchio, Patel, Xulu and Mussa have appeared several times in the Verulam Magistrate’s Court charged with the kidnapping, assault and robbery of the Saunderses. Recently a double murder charge was added to the charge sheet. Del Vecchio and Patel also face terrorism charges.

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