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Kabul: Deep inside Al Qaida's sanctuary high in the mountains of Pakistan, a tribal council was scrutinising kidnapped British film maker Sean Langan and deciding whether he should live or die.
The mood of the meeting, attended by Langan's captors, was hostile: tribal elders suspected him of being a CIA spy and wanted to behead him as a warning to other infidels not to enter their territory.
Gaunt and racked by malaria and dysentery, Langan rose unsteadily and argued for his life and for his terrified Afghan translator, shaking with fear beside him as he put the Englishman's words into Pushtun. By the time he had finished speaking, the gathering was murmuring with a grudging approval. He had won them over. They returned him to the three metres square underground cell where he spent ten weeks in captivity.
This weekend Langan, 43, whose films about meeting insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan had already won awards, was recovering in London with his ex-wife and two young children, promising that his days of risk-taking were over and vowing to change.
No more adventure
"I've finally realised that I've been living an utterly selfish life," he said. "I love my family and yet I turned my back on them for adventure. I have no right to put them through that again."
It is apparently the end of a remarkable career, which this spring would have culminated in the scoop of a lifetime in what may be the most dangerous place in the world.
When Langan made a perilous trek across the mountains from Afghanistan in March, followed by a ten-hour drive in a blindfold, he was the first Western journalist to venture deep into the region since 2001. His aim was to report on tribal warfare and attempt to interview some of the Taliban's strongest leaders: Baitullah Mehsud and Siraj Haqqani, men whose names strike fear into Afghans.
Langan's Afghan fixers spent months quietly negotiating with tribal elders to prepare the trip. Instead he walked into a carefully-planned trap. Within four days of arriving at the remote village that was his destination, Langan realised that his Taliban contacts were in fact his captors.
After several weeks of hearing nothing from him it dawned on the London production company that had commissioned him, Renegade Pictures, that something had gone horribly wrong. A Kabul-based British journalist, Tom Coghlan, was sent to find Langan's last known contacts, even meeting one of the kidnappers in the city of Jalalabad.
Agonising negotiations
After Coghlan bravely established a line of communication, weeks of agonising negotiations followed. Langan was subjected to mock executions and several of his teeth cracked because of vitamin deficiency. He was constantly tortured by the thought of never again seeing his two young sons in London. He wrote a makeshift diary, filling 17 notebooks. Once he was woken up by an airstrike as an unmanned US drone pounded Taliban fighters on the nearby border. His captors veered between joviality, asking him naive questions about life in Britain, and ruthless menace, threatening to kill him.
Alan Hayling of Renegade Pictures said that no governments were involved in the negotiations and at no time was a rescue mission planned. Instead Channel 4 found Westerners who know the region well to recruit tribal contacts, traditional men who are in conflict with the Al Qaida and Taliban fighters who have moved in to the region in the past few years, to plead for Langan's release.
Hayling said: "These are men who uphold traditions. They were able to argue that Sean should be released under tribal law because he had been invited in as a guest."
He said in the endgame Langan's family directed a negotiator in Pakistan who cannot be named for his safety. He said the last stage was "very, very hairy", and succeeded due to the negotiator who he called a "hero" with nerves of steel. For Langan, the hours before his release were the worst. His captors, who had become increasingly jittery, held him in a Taliban safe house in the Pakistani city of Peshawar where children the same age as his own were being shown DVDs of "spies" being beheaded.
Hayling dismissed stories circulating in Kabul that a ransom in excess of one million pounds had been paid as "ludicrous" and said all speculation about ransom was irresponsible as it put the safety of other journalists at risk.
He said: "We don't think it was a Taliban-authorised kidnapping, it was probably mainly criminal in motivation but with political overtones. We will probably never know who his kidnappers were."
Vital assignment
Langan and Renegade Pictures argue that despite the risk the assignment was carefully planned and of vital journalistic importance.
Veteran watchers of Afghanistan's murky criminal and terrorist netherworlds were astonished at Langan's breathtaking audacity. The region he entered, Waziristan, may be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden himself.
One security expert with experience of Afghanistan, who did not want to be named, compared going in to Waziristan to the fictional odyssey made in the film Apocalypse Now. In the film a one-way mission is sent into the sanctuary of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge.
Tonight, three stone lighter and, according to friends, "broken-up" mentally by the experience and exhausted, Langan is back with his family with a happy ending to his ordeal and able to joke about it. His ex-wife Anabel said she was "euphoric" at his return after weeks of agony.
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