Grey Granite finds the dignified stoicism of Linda Norgrove's parents to be highly refreshing in the culture of, emoting, sensationalism and blame in which we live.
Linda Norgrove's parents refuse to blame US for death
Parents give US credit for admitting kidnapped aid worker was probably killed by grenade thrown during Afghanistan rescue
Severin Carrell, Scotland correspondent guardian.co.uk, Friday 29 October 2010 09.59 BST Article history
John and Lorna Norgrove talk about their daughter Linda Link to this video The parents of Linda Norgrove, the aid worker killed during a failed rescue attempt in Afghanistan, said today that her kidnap was their worst nightmare but they did not blame US forces for her death.
In their first full interview since she died, John and Lorna Norgrove said it was "very creditable" for the US to admit their daughter was probably killed by a grenade thrown by a US navy Seal as they tried to free her in a remote mountain village in eastern Afghanistan.
"The rescue attempt it would appear to us was so close to being a total success and at the end there was what appears to have been a human error," John said.
Initially there were conflicting accounts about her death, with strong suggestions from western sources that she was killed by her militant Islamist kidnappers, possibly with a suicide vest, to thwart the rescue mission on 8 October.
But General David Petraeus, the commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, revealed in an early morning phone call to David Cameron that she was probably killed when a Seal threw a fragmentation grenade close to where she was lying.
Video footage of the raid showed that Linda, 36, had been fatally wounded as she lay on the ground to shelter after escaping from her captors during the chaos of the battle with the elite US special forces unit Seal Team Six.
Speaking three days after her daughter was buried a few miles from their home, Lorna said the family refused to enter the blame game. "Linda is dead; there is nothing we can do to change that."
John revealed that the couple had warned Linda of their fears that she might be kidnapped, a possibility that was their worst nightmare. But he said she was committed to her work in Afghanistan, was experienced and knew how to evaluate risk.
They would never know whether Linda would have survived if the rescue had not been attempted. "We don't think anybody is ever going to have a really clear picture, taking into account both sides; whether it was better to mount a rescue attempt or to carry on negotiating for a ransom with extremely dangerous and militant criminals.
"We do think that it is very creditable of the Americans to own up that there has been a mistake when they could so easily have covered the whole thing up [but] we have obviously got to wait for the outcome from the report which the British and American military are making."
Today's interview was released to mark the launch of a new charity the couple has set up in their daughter's memory, the Linda Norgrove Foundation, which will champion education projects for Afghan women and children. The couple have donated $100,000 (£63,000) from their own and Linda's savings to launch the fund.
It is expected to pay for university places for women and support girls' schools, with guidance and support from the US aid company Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI) that Linda was working for when she was kidnapped on 26 September.
Lorna said Linda's death "has changed our lives completely and we feel we need to move forward and do something to help continue her work, her humanitarian work, and to this end we are setting up a charity".
The couple, who run a croft on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, said they had tried to dissuade Linda – an accomplished and highly qualified aid worker with experience in Peru, Uganda and Afghanistan itself – from returning to Afghanistan with DAI.
"But there was no way as a parent I would stop her doing that. I knew that she had grown to love Afghanistan and love the people, and I knew that that's where her heart was," Lorna said. "She wanted to do humanitarian work there and I think that was what was so important to her and what she felt she had to do."
John said they had been apprehensive when she first went to Afghanistan for the UN in 2005. "At the time I said to her that our worst nightmare was that she might be kidnapped, but at the end we had to accept that she had been adventurous. She had done risky things before.
"After a while we accustomed ourselves to the fact that the risk was there and came to the conclusion that she was very capable at judging the risks and minimising them and she was far better at doing that on the ground in Afghanistan than we were at home on the croft in Scotland."
He said they heard of her kidnapping after climbing a nearby mountain on "a beautiful Sunday". They came home "to be met by the police who told us that Linda had been kidnapped. And from then on it was an absolute emotional rollercoaster.
"It's very difficult to explain to anybody who has not been through it but it felt like sometimes when you are busy and talking to people the pain almost seemed to go away and then it would just come in floods of emotion."
He said he pulled through that period "by imagining the elation of meeting up with Linda when she returned home in Stornoway airport and just imagining how that would be. So it came as an absolute nightmare to us two weeks later to have a visit from the police at 3 o'clock in the morning one day to say that she had been killed in a rescue attempt."
• Donations to the foundation can be made online at the www.lindanorgrovefoundation.org.uk website or by cheque to the Linda Norgrove Foundation, 3 Mangersta, Uig, Isle of Lewis, HS2 9EY.
No comments:
Post a Comment