KIDNAPPED by armed terrorists, subjected to mock executions, beaten and tormented, Kingsbridge resident Philip Durdey tells his story of being taken at gunpoint in Nigeria.

Phil was working as a saturation diver for an oil company when his nightmare began. The day they were due to leave after 90 days working on a pipelaying barge in the African country, Phil was woken by a friend who heard gunfire.

’The shooting woke my friend up, who woke me’, said Phil. The barge they were on had just been boarded by militants from MEND, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta.

Unbeknown to Phil, the security detail surrounding their barge had been radioed to warn them of the incoming armed militants, but they were never warned.

The gunmen made their way down to the galley and made the galley workers tell them ’where the white men were’.

When they started banging on the door of the cabin Phil shared with his friend, he knew they would start shooting through the door, so in a rock and a hard place situation, they opened the door and Phil and nine others were bundled into boats by gunmen.

’One of our guys was shot in the leg’, remembered Phil, but he didn’t see him again as the militants split the nine men into two groups, one of four and one of five.

He and three others were taken down a ’maze of rivers’ to the camp. Phil and his friend were trying to gauge how far away from the barge they had been taken. When they were finally unloaded into what Phil described as a ’purpose-built’ camp for holding hostages, the two believed they were about 20 miles from their original location.

’It was a jungle clearing’ explained Phil, ’There were huts for the hostages, we weren’t tied up but there were around 30-40 heavily-armed men in the camp at any one time and they had an armoury.’

Phil explained daily life as a hostage, saying there were some guards who were ’okay’ and others who were ’much more sadistic’.

The whole time he is there he is subjected to beatings, bullying, not enough food, discomfort, death threats and mock executions.

’They’d line us up and aim a gun at us, then one of them would fire a gun in another direction and we’d flinch at the noise, then open our eyes and see them all laughing hysterically, they thought it was hilarious’.

Phil said he was always in fear for his life the whole time he was held, but that it was ’varying levels of fear’, depending on the excitement of the guards.

’These guys were either uneducated or poorly educated,’ he explained, ’they were usually drunk or on drugs and they were always waving their guns around, cocking them.’ A lot of the time they spent ducking and moving out of the way of a moving gun barrel as it swung around towards them, always afraid of being shot accidentally.

’If you’re going to be kidnapped, Nigeria is quite a good place’, said Phil, explaining that they were fer because all the kidnappers wanted was the ransom money, and to get that, the hostages needed to be alive.

At one point it turned more political and his kidnappers released a statement to his parents, demanding the release of Mujahid Dobuko-Asari, a major political figure of the Ijaw ethnic group in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, or they would murder the hostages.

Eventually, the ransom for their release was paid, Phil is not sure how much or who by, he thinks either by the Nigerian government or the oil company he was employed by, but he knows it was nowhere near the $500,000,000 they were asking for.

At the time of his release, Phil and his fellow hostages had been planning their escape. ’We each came up with an escape plan and then picked the most likely to work. Just planning was good for our morale.

’It was getting quite tense at the end, two Indian hostages who had been kidnapped before us had two doctors at middlemen. The doctors had picked up the money from the company and then buggered off with it, so the guards were angry and agitated.

’They had just changed the guards too, so we were surrounded by men we didn’t recognise and they didn’t know us, they were crueller.’

Despite having no military training, ’I was in the scouts for a bit’ said Phil, they were days away from making their bid for freedom when they were finally released, which Phil called ’just as scary, if not scarier’ than being kidnapped in the first place.

’We were told we were going to be executed,’ Phil explained, ’another gang turned up and we thought they were going to snatch us so we ran into the jungle, but they caught us and we were put into boats.’

Phil said the moment of relief came when he spotted the other five men taken from their barge, in a boat with ’official looking’ men and he hoped for the first time that they might be released. The man who had been shot in the leg had received no medical treatment for his wound, but all had survived their ordeal.

Phil called his experience ’not one I would ever want to go through again’, but that now he was safe and it was over, he was ’glad’ it had happened.

Although soon after he would tense at loud noises, and while he was there he got ’tired’ of the noise of gunfire, the only ill-effects he has been left with is ’over-reacting’ to the feeling of something crawling on him, after his time in the jungle with the insects.

He has now written a book about his experiences, called ’$500,000,000 & Some Goats’ where he gives a day-by-day account of his time as a hostage, punctuated with flashbacks of his life including his time as a crab fisherman in Dartmouth.

Thinking back through his life, which he explains as an ’accident prone’ child, going off the road as an adults and recovering from heroin addiction, was a technique he used during his incarceration to distract his mind from what he was going through.

Unbelievably, Phil returned to Nigeria three weeks after he was released, and said he enjoyed being in the country, ’its like the Wild West’, and he continues to work as a saturation diver, currently in Qatar.

$500,000,000 & Some Goats is available from The Harbour Bookshop in Kingsbridge and Dartmouth Community Bookshop.