Sean Langan freed after hostage ordeal
There has been a media blackout on his abduction, whilst C4 explains to the Talibs that they are on the same side :-(
Due to the delicacy of the negotiations, the media had kept secret the fact that Sean Langan (pictured), the award-winning British documentary maker, had been kidnapped and held hostage for three months by Islamic extremists. And it paid off. On Saturday night, having endured various terrifying experiences, including a number of mock executions, the intrepid reporter was finally released.
Langan, 43, who in now back in Britain, was taken hostage while filming in a tribal area on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border in March. Negotiations with his kidnappers, which began after Channel 4 discovered that he had been taken a few weeks later, were "extremely tense all the way through". According to one source the kidnappers twice reneged on a promise to release him.
"It was only down to some extremely skilled negotiations, conducted at great risk, that clinched the release,” a source at Channel 4 told the Times. "This wasn't some bandit group. The kidnappers were well linked politically."
Langan, whose Channel 4 documentary Fighting the Taliban won the Rory Peck award for best feature and was nominated for a Bafta this year, surprised all his friends when he announced he wanted to be a war reporter a decade ago. Before that he had held a number of TV jobs, among them the "nightclub correspondent" for the East Anglia equivalent of Nationwide.
Today the journalist's blog has been updated with details of his kidnap, but prior to this the last posting was from Kabul on February 23, in which he had mused that he might "end up in Guantanamo Bay" for watching pirate Chinese DVDs. "Afghanistan, after all, is the forgotten frontline of the War Against Piracy," he had written.
Please dont judge him too harshly for these snarks, they are usually delivered with a dry wit, rather than the kind of polemic usually seen by our Meedja. On the whole he comes across as fairly even minded, neutral even.