For 26 years, a small window behind a rusted grill was Omar bin Omran’s only connection to the outside world. The teenager went missing in 1998 and although his family never lost hope, they feared the worst.
Then, on May 12, a tip-off posted on the village Facebook group led searchers to the house of a neighbour, less than 200m away from Bin Omran’s family home in the Algerian desert.
They found him alive, hidden in a hole concealed with hay.
Bin Omran, now 45, had apparently spent decades trapped in the house. The story of his rescue transfixed Algerians, many of whom have also experienced the unresolved disappearance of loved ones, and made headlines around the world.
But it also threw up new questions. Why was he there? How was he prevented from escaping? Why, when he watched his parents and siblings walk past that window time and again, had he felt unable to cry out for help?
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It is a hot summer’s day several weeks later, after the frenzy of media attention has died down.
El Guedid is about 200 miles from the capital, Algiers: a small, dusty village with only a few thousand residents.
In the centre of the village, two young boys point to the place where Bin Omran lived, an unassuming one-storey concrete building just across the street.
Nobody is home. Another neighbour says that Bin Omran has left with his family to escape the intrusion of YouTubers and the scrutiny of village gossip.
Bin Omran’s story begins in 1998. In his late teens he left home, telling his parents he was travelling to the nearest city of Djelfa, 45 miles away, for a vocational training programme. That was the last they heard from him.
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Growing concerned after some time without contact, his family looked for evidence that he had started the programme. They could not find any.
They had good reason to be worried. This was what Algerians call the “Black Decade”.
In 1991, a civil war broke out between the military government and various Islamist armed groups. An estimated 200,000 people were killed.
It ended in 2002, when Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president, offered an amnesty to the rebels. Bouteflika then ruled until popular protests deposed him in 2019.
However, the terms of that 2002 amnesty meant the families of about 20,000 people who had “disappeared” during the decade were deprived of their rights to find answers or obtain justice.
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It was in the middle of this harrowing chapter in Algeria’s existence that Bin Omran vanished. Some of his family feared he might have been killed in the war, or joined one of the armed factions.
But his mother suspected another possibility.
A man known as Abdel, 52, who was a neighbour, says that before Bin Omran’s disappearance, he had been a “naughty child”. He regularly skipped school, preferring to go out and graze animals with a local shepherd who was 16 years older than him.
Bin Omran and the shepherd had a “close connection” and spent the majority of their time together.
“The shepherd got attached to him,” Abdel says.
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Bin Omran’s mother never stopped wondering if the shepherd knew something about her son’s disappearance. She often asked him if he had seen or heard from her son.
“His mother had a feeling [he] was at the neighbour’s,” said a relative. “She asked the kids to go look for him there.”
Bin Omran was the seventh of nine siblings, but his brothers and sisters dismissed their mother’s theory.
She died in 2013 without a breakthrough in the case, despite a tireless search to find her son, including an appearance on the television show Everything is Possible, which profiles people across Algeria who are missing.
“His poor mum died while he was in captivity, without knowing what had happened to him, without knowing that all this time he was really right beside her,” the family’s neighbour said.
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The truth came to light when an anonymous post was made on the village’s Facebook group, saying “the man you have been looking for” was at the shepherd’s home “in a sheepfold”.
The shepherd, who is now 61, is in police custody and has not been named. But he was an active member of the village’s society, according to neighbours, both working for the local council and caring for his livestock. He attended the mosque regularly and exchanged pleasantries with Bin Omran’s family when they came across each other.
“We’d meet at the market and he’d chat to me about life back in the day,” one of Bin Omran’s relatives told reporters after the rescue. “You would never have suspected he was a big criminal.”
According to testimonies from neighbours and video footage captured of Bin Omran’s rescue, local youths arrived at the shepherd’s home to search for him.
The shepherd became uncomfortable when they neared a room filled with hay barrels, which raised the suspicions of a young boy, who rustled through the hay to find a small hole hiding the captive from sight.
Bin Omran appeared dishevelled, with hay in his hair, as he looked up at his neighbours, who were shining a torch down upon him while they recorded a video. In selfies taken by locals he appears shellshocked.
The shepherd tried to flee, but the neighbours held him until police arrived to take him into custody. Bin Omran was taken to hospital by the authorities to receive medical care.
One indicator that Bin Omran might have been at the house since the early days of his disappearance was the behaviour of his dog, Rocky. The pair had been inseparable.
Rocky barked and whined continuously outside the shepherd’s house in the first months following the disappearance. The dog then vanished — the family now suspect he was killed by his owner’s captor.
The tip-off followed an inheritance dispute, Algerian media has reported.
Abdel, the neighbour, thinks the shepherd’s younger sister made the Facebook post after the shepherd had arranged for her to marry an older man for financial gain. Indignant, she threatened to expose his secret if he forced her to marry.
Undeterred by her threat, the shepherd allegedly pursued the arrangements for the wedding, prompting her to expose Bin Omran’s whereabouts.
He is one of six suspects detained by police, with two more placed under judicial supervision, according to the most recent statement from the local court, Djelfa judicial council.
The other five are believed to be associates of the captor who were aware of the situation, including his sister. They are accused of “failing to notify the competent authorities”.
“A judicial investigation has been opened against the main suspect for the crime of kidnapping and luring a person, detaining a person without an order from the competent authorities and outside the cases permitted by the law, as well as human trafficking of a victim in a state of vulnerability,” the court said.
Villagers crowded around the police van as it transported the captor to jail that night, cheering as he was driven away.
As to why Bin Omran was captured, and why he was unable to escape for almost three decades, various theories exist. The outside of the captor’s home is covered in graffiti that illustrates the most popular hypotheses.
The leading theory among the villagers is that the shepherd was a sorcerer practising black magic.
The graffiti reads: “No life for the witch”, “Kingdom of the Devil” and “Stay in jail for ever witch”.
Belief in witchcraft is widespread across Algeria. Initial local media reports stated that Bin Omran had a continuous line across his palm that is seen to be favoured by fortune, suggesting he was captured by the “sorcerer” to be used as a talisman.
Relatives have been asked why Bin Omran did not leave the captor’s home and walk for less than a minute to return to his family.
“It’s not far, it’s true, it’s only some metres away,” one elderly relative told Algerian media. “But he wasn’t in his mind. We don’t know what happened to him. He told me that he could look at us from the window, but he couldn’t speak or come to us. I think there is black magic involved.”
Abdel, Bin Omran’s neighbour, is not convinced. What perplexes him is that the shepherd would leave home every day for work, leaving his captive unsupervised, and yet he took no opportunity to flee.
He believes that the captor, who was unmarried with no children, had groomed Bin Omran since childhood and held him for sexual purposes. Homophobic graffiti scrawled on the front of the shepherd’s house suggests others share this view.
A representative of Alouen, an underground association campaigning for LGBT rights in Algeria, said: “It’s always the same narrative, connecting the gay community to any horrible event in the news.
“A murder, an earthquake, this story — anything negative is blamed on our community,” they added. “The captor’s sexuality, which is unknown, is really not the point of this horrible story.”
Homosexual relationships are illegal in Algeria, with the threat of up to two years in jail. Although prosecutions are rare, homophobia is widespread and LGBT people risk verbal and physical abuse. Political groups are not allowed to campaign for LGBT rights and organisations such as Alouen officially do not exist.
“Everything is complicated for us, going to school, going out, finding a job,” the representative said. “You are in constant fear of being discovered.”
While the shepherd awaits trial in a jail cell, the most recent update of Bin Omran’s wellbeing came from his younger cousin, who responded to questions on Instagram and posted a new photo of him.
“Everything has changed for him,” she wrote. “He found another generation [of our family]. He found me taller than him.” She added that Bin Omran was learning how to use a phone and was adapting to his new life.
What he won’t do is tell his family what happened to him over the past three decades.
“Even we do not have the information. We talked to him about the issue,” his cousin wrote. “But his soul does not allow him to think about it again.
“God willing he will overcome all of what has happened and will marry. We will wait for that day to be happy with him and see his children.”
jodanieljournalist@protonmail.com
