Terry Waite: ‘I don’t know how I survived captivity, but I did’
from BBC News:
Thirty years after Terry Waite was released from nearly five years of captivity in Beirut, he said he survived by “keeping hope alive”.
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy went to Lebanon in 1987 to negotiate the release of several captured Britons – but was taken hostage himself.
Held in “grim” conditions, his Islamic fundamentalist captors freed him on 18 November, 1991, after 1,763 days.
He told the BBC: “I don’t know how I did it really. But I did.”
Terry Waite, now 82, who lives in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, was working on behalf of Robert Runcie to try to secure the release of several British prisoners, including journalist John McCarthy, when he was captured by Hezbollah.
For much of the time he was kept in solitary confinement, chained to a radiator, beaten and subjected to mock executions.
But he said “by keeping my mind alive and by keeping hope alive” he got through, and wrote many stories in his head, including his first book which he then committed to paper after being released.
Read also: Fed by grit and the Prayer Book by Sarah Meyrick, Church Times (from 2017)
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