The idea of crashing your own funeral is something saved only for bad movies as unnecessary plot twists. You may think that this situation probably doesn’t happen all that often in reality. But in this story, crashing your own funeral is just the tip of the iceberg.
Noela Rukundo left her home in Melbourne, Australia almost one year ago with her husband to attend a funeral in her native Burundi for her stepmother. In the hotel after the funeral, her husband called her and told her to go outside and get some fresh air. But she wasn’t greeted by her husband.
“Don’t scream,” Rukundo recalled a hitman waiting for her outside saying. “If you start screaming, I will shoot you. They’re going to catch me, but you? You will already be dead.”
She did as she was told, and was blindfolded so she couldn’t see where she was being taken. About 40 minutes later, she was tied to a chair in a random building. According to Australia’s ABC, one of the men who had captured her said the following:
“You woman, what did you do for this man to pay us to kill you?”
She was stunned, and for further confirmation, the men called her husband who told them to “kill her”. Rukundo promptly fainted.
But the men did not kill her as told. They did not believe in killing women, and also knew Rukundo’s brother. However, they did keep the money and pretend like she was dead. Two days later she was freed and given the $7,000 they were to have been paid and a cellphone with all of the calls from Balenga Kalala, her husband.
“We just want you to go back, to tell other stupid women like you what happened,” Rukundo recalled being told as the men drove away.
Now, it was time to get back at the man who had tried to kill her. Kalala and Rukundo met as recent refugees to Australia 11 years prior, but she knew he had a violent past in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo. But she didn’t think he was actually going to kill her.
After contacting the Kenyan and Belgian embassies to return to Australia, and also calling her pastor to tell him what happened without alerting Kalala, she found a way home – even though a funeral for her was already happening. After the mourners had begun to leave, Rukundo struck.
“Is it my eyes?” she recalled him saying. “Is it a ghost?”
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” she replied.
Even though Kalala “apologized”, the police were on their way. He was sentenced to nine years in prison for incitement to murder. Rukundo believes her husband wanted to kill her because he thought she was leaving for another man, something she denies.
Her ordeal is not over though. Melbourne’s Congolese community is not pleased with her, as her back door has been broken and she’s been left threatening messages at her home. She’s looking for a new place to live with her eight kids, five from Kalala’s previous marriage.
And lying in bed at night, Kalala’s voice still comes to her.
“Kill her, kill her,” she told the BBC. “Every night, I see what was happening in those two days with the kidnappers.”
This is a terrifying story with a “happy” ending, and it will probably be made into a movie soon enough.
[Washington Post/BBC/ABC Australia]
