In 2008, Juergen Kantner and his partner were abducted from their sailboat, held for 52 days in Somalia and released after a six-figure ransom was reportedly paid.
Then he went back to Somalia to get his boat.
After three decades sailing the oceans, Kantner was a German on paper only.
Photo: AP / SITE Intel Group
“Why should I go back to Germany, where I have nobody to help me?” Kantner was quoted as saying at the time. “I have no friends back home.”
Despite that ordeal, he and his partner continued to sail in dangerous waters.
On Monday, the Philippine and German governments identified Kantner, 70, as the man with shaggy white hair and an unkempt beard who was shown being beheaded in a video released by a Philippine militant group, Abu Sayyaf.
It had demanded US$600,000 in ransom for Kantner and had set a deadline of Monday for the two governments to comply.
“We are deeply shaken at this inhuman and horrifying act,” Germany’s Foreign Office said in a statement. “We condemn the murder of this German in the strongest possible terms. There is no justification for such an act.”
Kantner and his partner, Sabine Merz, were seized in November last year while sailing in an area of the southern Philippines under the control of Abu Sayyaf.
Their 16m yacht, the Rockall, was found on Nov. 7 with a dead woman later identified as Merz, 59, still aboard.
Media reports said a spokesman for Abu Sayyaf had accused Merz of firing on them, and they shot her dead.
In a video circulated last month by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist Web sites, Kantner said the Islamist extremists would behead him soon if they did not receive a ransom.
The video, which runs for less than 2 minutes and was posted on various sites affiliated with Abu Sayyaf, showed Kantner, hogtied and slumped to the ground with a machete-wielding militant behind him. The bearded and disheveled hostage says faintly: “Now they’ll kill me.”
The Philippine government denounced the killing.
“We grieve as we strongly condemn the barbaric beheading of yet another kidnap victim,” said Jesus Dureza, an adviser to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte.
“Up to the last moment, many sectors, including the armed forces of the Philippines, exhausted all efforts to save his life. We all tried our best, but to no avail,” Dureza said.
Kantner appeared to have been fully aware of the risks he faced in continuing to sail through dangerous waters.
He told the German newsmagazine Stern months after his release that as long as governments continued to pay ransom, the kidnappings would continue.
However, he also felt he could not remain on land.
“I bought my first boat at 28,” he said. “All in all, I have lived more than 30 years at sea, have worked on ships and have delivered yachts — that pays well.”
“I lived for 14 years on a sailing boat with my family. Both of my children grew up there,” he added.
The whereabouts of Kantner’s children were not immediately clear on Monday.
At that time of his release from Somalia, he was already over 60 and knew that he would not be able to find work in Germany.
Still, he spent four months back in his home country, trying to get back on his feet financially, he told Yacht magazine in a 2009 interview.
Then a Somalian living in Germany reached out and told Kantner that his boat lay in harbor in the port of Berbera.
Bucking warnings from German authorities about the risks of trying to recover the vessel, Kantner borrowed money and bought a plane ticket.
“When you live 33 years on a ship and never slept in a bed, only in a berth, then you’re quite attached to your ship,” he said.
He repaired Rockall enough to set sail later that year with Merz for Aden, Yemen, and then on to Asia, where Kantner said he had connections that he hoped could provide him with odd jobs.
At the time he said he had considered getting a machine gun to mount on the deck of the boat, but confessed that the idea gave him an “uneasy feeling.”
“We have both said we don’t want to go through that again,” he said of their abduction by the Somalians. “We would rather shoot ourselves.”
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