In one video, the man appears buried under layers of straw in the middle of an unsanitary cattle shed, with a pleading look and a full beard. Omar Ben Omran, a 45-year-old Algerian who mysteriously disappeared without a trace in 1998, was found kidnapped at his neighbor’s house in the village of El Guédid, in the north of Algeria, authorities announced Tuesday, May 14.
Wow, this is unbelievable! A man who vanished 27 years ago at the age of 17 has been discovered alive just 200 meters from his family’s home, hidden in a neighbor’s cellar.
Omar Bin Omran of Algeria disappeared in 1998 while on his way to a vocational school, and now he’s been… pic.twitter.com/kFwlz5CJCF
— 🇺🇸 InterStar Media 🇺🇸 (@InterStarMedia) May 15, 2024
Omar Ben Omran’s ordeal lasted twenty-six years. It was at the dawn of his twenties that the Algerian disappeared. Born in 1979 into an honorable family of mujahideen – who fought for the country’s independence during the Algerian Revolution – according to the national daily El Khabar, At the time, the man regularly went to the Djelfa training center, nearly 70 kilometers from his town.
Found thanks to a message on social networks
When he disappeared without a trace, his family launched a vast search to find him, calling on the police and the national gendarmerie, even calling for witnesses to the reality show And everything is possible! reports the newspaper. After years of fruitless searches, his relatives finally gave up on finding him, assuming he was kidnapped and murdered during the Black Decade – the Algerian civil war which shook the country from 1992 to 2002 –, specifies the Algerian online newspaper Emerging Maghreb.
Until a mysterious message posted on social networks shook the web, almost three decades later. In this publication, a relative of the suspect reveals that an individual living in the commune of El Guédid, precisely a neighbor of the victim’s family, has been kidnapping Omar Ben Omran for all this time, according to the daily TSA. He is a 61-year-old municipal employee, who lived as if nothing had happened all these years. The relatives of the missing person then begin looking for evidence, cross-checking the clues. And they remember a more than revealing element: during the disappearance of his master, Omar Ben Omran’s dog had remained for several days on the threshold of the suspect’s house, before being found dead, probably poisoned by the latter, details the newspaper El Khabar.
An opening in his makeshift shelter
This element as well as the suspicious behavior of the neighbor motivate them to carry out a surprise raid on his home, where they come face to face with Omar Ben Omran. Throughout his captivity, the latter could see and hear the members of his family through an opening in his makeshift shelter, but “was unable to scream or flee because of a spell her captor had cast on her,” his relatives said in local media. This is how Omar Ben Omran learned of the death of his mother a few years earlier.
Alerted, the gendarmes ended up carrying out a search of the suspect’s house, announced the Djelfa governorate prosecutor’s office. Arrested, the sixty-year-old will be tried at the end of his interrogation. His motives remain unknown at this time.