http://heraldsun.com.au – At
9pm on the evening of April 6 Sally Faulkner was sitting between the
two single beds in a small one bedroom “safe house’’ in the shelled out
poor area of Sabra in Beirut, desperately ringing the Australian embassy
in Lebanon. On the first try no one answered. On the second, a security
official said to ring back the following morning when the office was
open. Plans to be quickly rescued by Australian officials — and getting
some assistance to escape Lebanon — evaporated throughout the night.

How
different the saga of the past fortnight may have played out if
Faulkner had managed to get inside the embassy grounds and obtain some
limited diplomatic protection for her children. Instead, on this
first evening back with their mother in nearly a year, Faulkner’s
children, five year old Lahela and three year old Noah were sleeping
peacefully in the safe house.

It had been the former Brisbane air
hostess’ happiest, yet most tumultuous day and she was alternatively
resting on pillows, with arms outstretched to cuddle both children or
fretting about getting out of the country.

The kidnapping of the
children had gone off reasonably well: the Lebanon weightlifting
champion and occasional government driver Mohammed Hamza, 26, had
scouted the location and organised the rental car, driven by his friend
in the Civil Service, Khaled Barbour. Barbour had only been asked the
day before if he could help out driving some media around town and never
received any payment.

Faulkner had been in the back of the car to reassure the
children all was well even though their grandmother Ibtissma Berri was
knocked to the ground in the melee, allegedly by the burly Cypriot
tattoo artist Craig Michael.

The 60 Minutes cameraman
Ben Williamson had captured all of the intense, but quick action near
the bus stop in Hadath, the middle of Hezbollah controlled Beirut.

Now
crammed with the two children, Barbour drove to the frenetic Beirut
suburb of Sabra at the request of a phone call from the chief planner
Adam Whittington, a dual Australian and British passport holder who
lives in Sweden. Whittington, 40, had been an accomplished but
controversial child snatcher, returning children to parents with
appropriate custody orders in the previous few years and he believed
Faulkner’s orders giving her custody issued in December 2015 from the
Australian Family Court were legally binding.

For the past four
months Whittington’s Lebanese contact, Mohammed Hamza — introduced to
Whittington by Hamza’s older brother who lives in Sweden — researched
the area. Whittington sent him the coordinates on a Google map and asked
for as much detail about the area as possible. He was to be paid
US$500, Hamza said. Around this time Whittington received the first of
two payments totalling $115,000 directly from the Channel Nine accounts
department.

Barbour’s carload of people and the accompanying vehicle believed to contain the 60 Minutes crew
arrived in Sabra. They suddenly imposed themselves on Hamza’s mother,
Yasmine and quickly reorganised the room into a mini-studio. She had no
notice that a film crew, child recovery experts, a mother and two
children would descend on her tiny second floor apartment where five
people sleep squeezed into the solo bedroom and on the couch in the
lounge room but immediately offered apricot juice.

Alarm
bells for Faulkner must have been ringing at this point for the entry
into the apartment block is a rabbit warren of dank concrete rubble
corridors between two fishmongers, dangling electrical wires and the
first impressions don’t improve with a large gag-inducing rotting pile
of garbage on the first floor. This was a far cry from the plush $1000 a
night of the Movenpick Hotel where the television crew was based, nor
the planned three star safe house hotel, the Napoleon in Hamra street.

Undeterred,
the crew spent the morning filming the happy reunion inside the Hamza
family flat: Sally playing with the kids on the rug, Sally feeding the
kids cucumber and chicken, Sally with a beaming smile that didn’t leave
her face, and young Lehala squealing with delight that she was to return
to Australia. Both Craig and Whittington left once the filming began to
get the next stage underway: the planned getaway via the Mediterranean
to Cyprus. “Don’t come until I ring,’’said Whittington to the others,
who were continuing to film and interview Faulkner.

Around three
hours after the snatch Williamson got Faulkner to go out the front into
the busy market street which was chaotic and colourful — great
background for television — and encouraged her to make a phone call to
her husband, Ali Elamine. Mohammed Hamza’s sister Sara was there to
watch the action.

Ben said “ring Ali now, tell him the children
are with you,’’ Sara told News Corp Australia during a visit to the safe
house this week.

That
encouragement, perhaps to capture some of drama of the moment, was
enacted at 10.50am and was to prove the fatal flaw in the plan.

Across town by this point Faulkner’s estranged husband was already in action.

Immediately
after being knocked to the ground and seeing the kidnap car race down
the street, Mrs Berri rang her son and he made a flurry of phone calls
to the police, then to the Australian embassy and then he tried
Faulkner’s phone. He had sensed being surveilled for some months and he
had been tipped off that Faulkner was planning to try and grab the
children.’’

“She had shopped around before she chose Whittington’s
company,’’ Elamine said. He was angry they had succeeded on his patch,
just a few hundred metres from his middle class apartment.

“I
called the embassy but they didn’t open until 9 o’clock and I couldn’t
wait for everything to open, I had to find my kids,’’ he said.

Elamine
claimed to be aware Hamza had spent at least two months assessing the
area and that the children’s emails had alerted him to a kidnap plot.
But Whittington believes another person may have been actively passing
on information to Elamine, having been kept in the loop from Faulkner
who had been seeking reassurance on some details of his kidnap plan.

As
the clock ticked past nine o’clock, Elamine finally received a call
back from the Australian embassy and he was asked if Faulkner had a
criminal record in Lebanon. He said all he wanted to know was if
Faulkner had the kids but the diplomats refused to tell him “so I hung
up’’.

By this time Whittington was down at the Beirut marina,
finalising the get away motorcruiser Kaboypaki, the boat hired for him
in Cyprus by the man alleged to have done the snatch, tattooist Craig
Michael.

Those back at the Hamza family flat were waiting for
Whittington’s call to make their getaway on the boat. But the calls
never came.

Unbeknown
to them the conversation between Faulkner and Elamine — all captured by
Channel Nine — had been made on a phone registered to Whittington.

“I will let you see the kids if you want, don’t worry Ali,’’ Sally reassured him.

But Elamine was ropeable: “Bring them right back, right back now, its better for you if you do’’.

The
police were able to track down Whittington through the phone and his
hotel registration and police arrested him on the docks. All they had to
do was then wait for the 60 Minutes crew to return to the hotel and walk straight into handcuffs.

First
to fall into the trap was Rice who left for the Movenpick around 7.30pm
wondering what could possibly have gone wrong. An hour later Brown,
Ballment and Williamson had packed up the cameras and departed also,
leaving just Faulkner and the children in the flat with the Hamza
family.

Just 30 minutes later Faulkner began to panic that she
cannot contact Whittington, or any of the 60 Minutes crew and tries that
desperate contact with the embassy.

Mrs
Hamza tries to reassure Faulkner and lets her rest with the children in
the bedroom while the rest of the family sleeps on the two couches in
the lounge room.

“Sally didn’t sleep the night. In the late
morning she tried the embassy again. She didn’t hear from them so she
decided to bath the children but we don’t have any shower, just a bucket
so I got some hot water and she started washing the kids,’’ Mrs Hamza
said.

At 12.50pm that day just as Faulkner was dressing the
children a team of 10 heavily armed police burst into the flat. Mrs
Hamza rang her carpenter husband, also called Mohammed, who was working
two minutes down the road, but when he entered he too was arrested.

It was, by all who witnessed the police raid, an extremely distressing time.

Mrs
Hamza said: “They pulled a gun on me and arrested (son) Mohammed in
front of the kids. He had known some of those people who arrested him
and four of them were beating him.

“Lahela was screaming and Noah
was very upset. Sally was telling the police to stop yelling at her and
that she wanted to finish dressing the kids first before she would let
them take her and the kids away.’’

The police then organised for
Elamine and his brother to pick up Lahela and Noah from the Hadath
police station, where he insisted Faulkner not be handcuffed until after
he had left.

Mrs Hamza insisted that Faulkner was a loving mother and the children were ‘’really really happy’’ to be back in her presence.

Now
two weeks on, Faulkner has left Lebanon a free woman, but shackled by
emotional ties, having had to give up custody of the children. Mrs
Hamza, who did nothing but try and be a generous host to Elamine’s
children, has found her own son beaten in jail and she is too poor to
pay his legal costs.

Elamine dropped the charges against the 60
minutes crew and Faulkner, but has refused to drop charges against the
kidnap crew and they now face an uncertain future behind bars