‘I was held hostage by al-Qaeda for 565 days. My greatest fear was my family watching my head being cut off’

Five hundred and sixty-five days would be a long time for anyone to go without seeing their wife and children. It’s enough time for teenage sons to become a little less like boys, rather more like men. Enough time for a marriage to be tested. Enough time for the normal ebbs and flows of family life to become entirely foreign. Five hundred and sixty-five days is a long time to be away from your world. Particularly when those days are spent in a three-by-one-metre cell without a bed, a window, or much hope of ever seeing loved ones again

In 2014, Bob Semple was working in Hadramawt, in eastern Yemen, as a freelance construction manager for an oilfield services company. Living away from his wife Sallie and their children, back in Hampshire, wasn’t ideal, but Bob, then 62, would fly home every two months and stay for three weeks at a time. The money was good, and with three sons to support and a mortgage to pay, it always seemed worth it. He’d spent two decades in the Royal Engineers, with tours in Libya and the Falklands. It was an old Army pal who called him up one day, when he was working on engineering sites in London, and asked if he’d like to come and work tax free in Yemen.

On the morning of 3 February 2014, Bob drove to work, with two Yemeni colleagues in the back seat. He was looking forward to boarding a plane back home in a few days. He’d upgraded his flight to business class so he could experience sitting on the top deck of an A380. When a taxi drove across his path and screeched to a halt, he wasn’t scared. ‘I thought, “Typical bad driving,”’ he recalls. Then two men – both of them carrying guns – got out and headed straight for him. He says he stayed calm. His Army training kicked in.

Bob’s passengers in the back seat tried to run, but were bundled into the boot of the assailants’ Land Cruiser. One of the attackers, who was armed with a gun and a knife, began stabbing Bob through the window. He got out and began to fight. ‘I pressed the magazine release button [on the assailant’s gun]. It dropped out and I noticed there were no rounds in the chamber. I thought: “They’re just using these guns to frighten me.”’

They clearly didn’t mean to kill him – yet: ‘There were now three of them. One was clubbing me on the head with a gun, the other one was trying to stab me, and in the end they overcame me.’ They managed to wrestle Bob into the car. Wedged between two of his assailants, Bob’s mind was racing. ‘I thought, “The second turning is where the German embassy is, I’ll hit the door catch and I’ll see if I can bundle [one of them] and me out of the truck,”’ he says. ‘I did that, but as I rammed him, his AK-47 stuck in the doorway and the magazine stopped him from going out. Behind me, a guy threw a towel over my head and pulled [me] back.’

Bob was taken to a safehouse where he was stripped. He could tell these men had military training, ‘just by their demeanour and the way they moved’. He would later learn they were al-Qaeda. Soon, they would be attempting to ransom his life.

They sprayed iodine on his stab wounds (he was of more use to them alive than dead), blindfolded him, dressed him as a Yemeni woman, jammed a pistol under his ribcage and got him back in the car. They drove ‘at breakneck speed’ for four hours. When they arrived at an undisclosed location, they installed him in a tiny cell. They gave him cotton trousers to wear and chained his foot to the wall. The cell had a toilet at the end and a tap. ‘They brought me a small mattress, which was about an inch and a half thick. They threw that down. They gave me a pillow. That’s it.’

Anyone would have forgiven Bob for finally feeling some of the fear he had been keeping at bay. But, in fact, he says he just felt resigned to his fate. ‘I was sure they were going to kill me,’ he says. He remembers thinking: ‘You’ve been taken, Bob. Nobody’s coming for you… This s—t’s all yours. When they kill you, just let’s hope it’s quick.’

Every day that followed came with the possibility that he would be executed. Al-Qaeda (much diminished since Osama bin Laden’s assassination in 2011) had capitalised on political turmoil in Yemen. By 2014, with the rise of Islamic State, the jihadist movement had fractured. That year, the world watched as Isis beheaded a number of foreign hostages, filming the killings and publicising them in a horrendous show of brutality. In August, the American journalist James Foley, who had been abducted in Syria in 2012, was executed by the Islamic State militant known as Jihadi John. In September, British aid worker David Haines was killed, 18 months after being taken hostage. The following month, Alan Henning, a British humanitarian worker, was the fourth western hostage killed.

Bob’s captors wanted him to give up the names of other Brits and Americans he knew in Yemen. He refused. ‘The only fear I had was that Sallie would have to watch a video of me having my head cut off,’ he says. ‘I hoped they would just pull the trigger and it would be finished.’ On the 10th day, Bob decided that if he was to get through this, he would have to put Sallie and the boys in a box and throw away the key. ‘I thought, “I cannot do this if I’m thinking about home. Home no longer exists. I’m here, this is me, and nothing else.”’

Every day, he would be brought out of his cell to sit in the main room, so his captors could watch him, though in reality they spent all day watching TV. Meanwhile, Bob focused on an escape plan. Slowly, over six weeks, he rubbed together two links in the chains around his feet until he wore through the metal. The two men guarding him – ‘one skinny, one skinnier’ – used to watch TV in the evenings outside Bob’s cell. ‘They were starting to relax a bit more now, so they would fall asleep in front of the telly. I waited until one of them was asleep and the other had left. I thought: “I’m going to go, now,”’ he says, describing the moment he tried to escape as calmly as if he were talking about popping out to walk the dog.

Bob picked up the orange sheet lying on his mat, thinking it would provide sun protection when he made it out to the desert. He had a bottle of water, and another empty one in case he needed to urinate in it and drink it. Now he had a quick decision to make. Should he kill the sleeping man outside his cell, or slip past? If he killed him and was caught, there was no doubt he would be killed himself. ‘I thought, “Well, I’ll just sneak past and let him sleep.” As soon as he stepped outside his cell, the second man appeared and ‘all hell broke loose’. They put Bob back in his cell, this time chaining his hands as well as his feet together. One said in Yemeni Arabic: ‘If you try and do that again, we’re going to shoot you.’

‘I grabbed hold of his fingers and stuck them up against my head and said “now”. And he just laughed and buggered off,’ Bob recalls.

Four thousand miles away, in Eastleigh, near Southampton, Bob’s wife, Sallie, and their sons, Tom, then 21, Sam, 17, and Ben, 14, were in a hell of their own. Sallie, a nurse, had been at work the day the Foreign Office phoned. Ben was at home on an inset day. ‘He took the call and then phoned me up at work and said: “Mum, Dad’s been kidnapped, I don’t know if it’s a joke or something.”’

You don’t have to spend much time with Sallie to realise she is as straightforward and practical as her husband. The pair met when she was a young nurse, he a sergeant for the Royal Engineers. They are naturally ‘get on with it’ people. Sallie was in shock, but she knew instinctively there could only be one way for this to go. ‘I was told [by the Foreign Office] that if there was [a request for] money, we wouldn’t be able to pay a ransom to terrorists,’ she says. ‘I understood why.’

At the time, there was ‘all the Isis stuff on the television, all the beheadings. So my first thought was that he was going to be killed.’ For months, the Foreign Office phoned every day, keeping Sallie abreast of the leads they were following. The local police assigned them family liaison officers. They were told not to tell anyone Bob had been kidnapped, beyond Sallie’s boss, her parents and the boys’ girlfriends. Officials didn’t want the net to be too wide in case the kidnappers were to get in touch with a ransom.

The only thing for it was to try to go about their lives as normal, while every day fearing the phone call that would confirm the worst. There was work and school to attend, and bills to be paid – now just with Sallie’s nursing salary to cover them.

Then, one day in September, Bob rang. Remembering the moment he made the call, he says: ‘They parcelled me up into the back of a truck and drove me out into the middle of the boonies [nowhere]. We were in the sand desert. You could feel by the tyres. They got a cell phone out and said, “Right, phone home.”’

Bob dialled home and Sallie answered. ‘I said: “I’m OK. They want $10 million.”’ That’s all they would let me say. And then they hung up… I said to them: “You’re al-Qaeda, so no one will give you any money.”’ They destroyed the SIM card and drove him back. At home, Sallie was in shock. ‘I was going, “Where are you?” and asking stupid blabbery questions when actually I should have thought about more sensible things to say.’

After the call, the fight to find Bob seemed to stall. There had been talk of swapping a prisoner for him, Sallie recalls. ‘Then it just went silent.’ Every few weeks, Bob’s captors would drag him back out to the desert and force him to talk to a camera. ‘Sometimes they’d take me out and make me kneel in the sand and put a gun to my head,’ he recalls. Each time he feared this would be the moment they would kill him and film it. They always told him to repeat the line about the $10 million. ‘They wanted me to beg for my life. I said, “I’m not a very good actor.”’ They’d tell him: ‘You have to cry.’ But Bob says: ‘I can’t do that. So I didn’t do it. I just said what they wanted [me to say].’

Sallie never saw the videos. Wherever they were sent, they didn’t work. No deal was ever struck for Bob’s life. It’s almost impossible to imagine how anyone could endure months in a tiny cell with nothing to do and no one to talk to. ‘To keep myself sane, I calculated how many days old I was, including leap years,’ says Bob. ‘I was tracking the sun, because there was a gap in the bricks at the top. So when it stopped coming through the hole, that meant the sun was directly above me. And then when it came back a month later, I was calculating what latitude I was at.

‘I had a little hole in the wall that I could see through. I used to wait until it was dark, and then at night I looked through it and if I could see a star, then it was a good day. And if I didn’t, it was a bad day. The temperature in that room must have been in the 50s, so I just used to lie and think of nothing. Just sweat.’

Years later, once home in Hampshire, Bob experienced a strange phenomenon that his psychiatrist links back to those endless days in captivity. Bob recalls: ‘Sallie would leave for work having put the washing on, for example, and tell me to hang it out. I’d sit there, and then three seconds later she’d come back in and say, “You didn’t hang the washing out?”’ She’d been at work all day, but for Bob, time had stood still. ‘My psychiatrist said this is what we call disassociation. Your internal clock stops and you disassociate yourself from everything,’ he explains. It was exactly what Bob had done for all those months in his cell. ‘I did nothing. I zoned out.’

Bob’s lowest point came a year in, but hope came from an unlikely source. His captors had put a light and television in his cell, but without any electricity, they were no use to him. ‘I was in the depths of depression, really feeling low. I hadn’t seen a star for a week. And suddenly the light came on and I thought, “F—king hell. And then the television [turned on]. And it was BBC World. They said: “Terry Waite has just come back from South Africa.” And then the electrics went again. And I thought: “Terry Waite? Come on! He did about five years [in captivity].”’

At home, Sallie was beginning to struggle. Her wages couldn’t cover the mortgage and she was constantly worrying about money. She had accepted that Bob may already be dead, but the uncertainty was hard to bear. ‘That not knowing,’ she says, remembering the long months when she and her boys were so in the dark. ‘When people die, you have a grave. You have those memories of getting a chance to say goodbye. We were saying goodbye to something that wasn’t tangible.’

Terry Waite had been in touch to offer his support. Knowing Bob’s background, he suggested that Sallie speak to the Army Benevolent Fund, a charity that provides lifetime support to British soldiers. The ABF, which is one of The Telegraph’s Christmas charities this year, immediately swooped in to help, paying off the remaining £15,000 on Sallie and Bob’s mortgage, and supporting her while she made the difficult decision to sell the house and move in with her parents.

‘I was planning for me to be living without Bob,’ says Sallie. In August, the Foreign Office rang. They had no further leads to 
follow. ‘In my mind, he’d been killed. The kids and I all thought he wasn’t coming back.’

In the same year that Bob was kidnapped, civil war broke out in Yemen. At the time Sallie received that phone call, a gun battle was going on in the area where he was being held.

He barely had any interaction with his captors. Every night they would cook themselves a meal and give him whatever was left. ‘Rice and chicken. And then sometimes you got nothing.’ Bob had been trying to convince the skinny boy guarding his cell to get him a biscuit, and one day, in the midst of the fighting, he handed Bob a packet containing two digestives. ‘I thought, “Yes! Result.” I put them in the corner of my cell and said to myself, “I’ll have them later. I’ll look through the window and I’ll definitely see a star tonight.”’

But moments later Bob found himself blindfolded again. ‘I thought: “Not another video.” They dressed me up as a woman, took me out, put me in the front of a pick-up truck and jammed the revolver up me. Off they drove.’

When they stopped, the man with the gun got out. The driver too. Someone else got in and pulled away slowly. ‘Congratulations,’ he said to Bob, adding something he couldn’t understand about Abu Dhabi. At some point, Bob says he was put in the boot and then driven through the night. ‘We stopped, the boot opened, a hand grabbed me. In English, a voice said: “You’re safe now.”’ Bob asked if he could take his blindfold off but was told not to. They took him to a new car. It was only once he was inside that a voice said he could take his blindfold off. ‘He gave me his ID card. [UAE] Special forces.’

It seemed impossible his ordeal could be over. ‘He said that the helicopter’s coming. And I thought “bollocks”. I still didn’t believe it.’ But then a Black Hawk appeared on the horizon: ‘It came on the hover, they got me inside and I sat in between the two mini gunners. As she went up, I could see all the weapons went hot. I could see the printout of where we were, and we were in south Yemen.’

He was then taken to a plane and flown to the UAE. The British ambassador was waiting for him in the airport, holding a phone with a direct line to Sallie. He could hear a party going on in the background. Wow, he said, celebrating already? ‘She said, “No, this is a party for Ben, he’s done really well in his GCSEs.”’

Five hundred and sixty-five days of fear and helplessness dispelled in a sentence. There was his life, there was his family, waiting for him to return to them. Bob can still recall the first shower he took in a plush hotel room that night – and the first real meal (a burger and a Jack Daniel’s). The SAS debriefed him and gave him the option to either fly home on an Etihad plane, where he’d have the whole of first class to himself but fly into Heathrow (where there would likely be press waiting), or take the C-17 sitting on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi to Brize Norton. ‘I said: “I’ll just take Crab Air.”’

Bob and Sallie’s memories of those first days after they were reunited sound strange and dreamlike. The Foreign Office put them up at Dorneywood, the mansion used by the Chancellor of the Exchequer as a country residence. ‘I got there, went to the door, and there was Sal. And there were my kids with their girlfriends,’ says Bob. ‘It was bloody excellent.’

It has been nine years since Bob, now 73, came home, and the road has been a long and often bumpy one. He isn’t one to use words like trauma, but no one could have escaped an experience like his without carrying some. ‘You weren’t you when you came back,’ says Sallie, now 62. ‘You were very different.’

He doesn’t find it easy to talk about his emotions and is sometimes shockingly matter-of-fact about what he has been through. But when he speaks about his work with the ABF, for whom he travels around the country telling his story and helping to raise money, he lets his feelings spill over.

‘It’s the kindness of people – that’s it,’ he says, a lump in his throat. ‘If I start crying, don’t worry about it,’ he warns me gently. He tells me about an event he attended with fellow veterans, many of whom had terrible injuries. ‘I said to them, “I feel like a fraud.” And they said, “We couldn’t have done what you did.”’ He lets himself cry then, sitting in the safety of his own living room, Sallie by his side, the horrors of his time in an al-Qaeda cell long behind him. I wonder if he feels proud of how he coped, looking back? ‘No,’ he says. ‘It just happened.’

Army Benevolent Fund is one of four charities supported by this year’s Telegraph Christmas Charity Appeal. The others are Humanity & Inclusion, Teenage Cancer Trust and Alzheimer’s Research UK. To make a donation, please visit telegraph.co.uk/2024appeal or call 0151 317 5247