Wait agonizing for family
Uncertainty 'unbearable' for Montreal kin of pilot kidnapped in Colombia
SARAH STAPLES
Montreal Gazette
Monday, May 06, 2002
The last time Carmen
Prégent spoke to her husband, Gilles, the veteran helicopter pilot phoned from Cali, Colombia, to say he had finished refueling for the last leg of a trek from Calgary to Peru - and that all was well.
It was April 19, a Friday afternoon, she distinctly recalls.
Days later, External Affairs officials delivered a more sobering message: the helicopter was missing, and her Montrealer husband had been kidnapped by Colombian rebels.
Carmen
Prégent admits she has barely slept since.
"He phoned just before getting back on board to say that everything was going great," she recalled in a phone interview yesterday from her home in Île Bizard. "And then we lost completely track of him. We have no idea how the negotiations are going, we don't even have a motive yet (for the kidnapping). I just pray and pray he'll come home, safe - what else can I do?"
Until Thursday, External Affairs officials were officially treating the aircraft's disappearance as a potentially weather-related accident.
They are now confirming that
Prégent, 50, along with mechanic Jay Riddell, 27, from Vancouver, and French-born Pierre Galipon, are probably in the hands of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC - extortionists and kidnappers credited with stealing two other helicopters and several small planes this year alone.
The information comes from Fernando Tapias, commander of the Colombian Armed Forces, who has said operatives intercepted communications between FARC militants suggesting the Canadians and Frenchman were taken hostage.
Galipon and his father co-own Heliamerica SA, a Bolivian company that bought the 30-year-old Bell 212 for $1.8-million from a Canadian bank. The company then hired
Prégent and Riddell to fly it to Lima, Peru.
Armand Mullie, a helicopter mechanic with Eagle Copters Ltd., in Calgary, where the men stayed for a week before their flight, said Galipon told him over beers he had a contract with a major oil company to service an oil field, and that the heavy-duty helicopter - known in the business as a "flying truck" - was needed for routine flights over the jungle.
"He got the contract and then started looking for the helicopter - that's how it's done," the mechanic said.
Normally, helicopters are dismantled, shipped, then reassembled, in order to avoid flying over rebel-controlled territory.
But Galipon told him it had taken time to find, buy and prepare the bird, and the job's start date was only days away.
Mullie, who has known
Prégent for 31 years, said the men knew they could be kidnapped over the mountains of Colombia, and had meticulously planned the 50-hour, 7,865-kilometre trip to try to minimize the risk.
"They knew the game," he said. "We've all come close to being captured."
Mullie, 54, said fickle weather, especially near the country's high mountain peaks, prompts pilots to stick close to the ground and fly in valleys, where they become vulnerable to anti-
aircraft fire from above and below.
He said
Prégent, a career pilot with 27 years' and 12,000 hours' flying experience, told him he had narrowly missed being captured about two years ago, while he was on a similar mission to ferry an A-Star model helicopter from Canada to a client in South America.
The two friends spoke a week before
Prégent left, on April 17, for his latest assignment.
Two days later, civil aviation officials lost radio contact with the crew near Mercaderes, a town about 320 kilometres southwest of Bogota.
Marie-Christine Lilkoff, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs, said Canada has formally requested the Colombian government's help in tracking down the hostages and securing their safe release. Canadians are also working with Heliamerica to locate the men.
But that is cold comfort to Carmen
Prégent, who, five years ago, gave up a job at a bank and left her extended family in Chile to marry
Prégent and move, with her son and daughter, to Canada.
Now, with her relatives so far away they are unable to provide comfort, she says, her voice beginning to tremble.
And she's also gone from being financially independent to worrying about how she will feed her family: she speaks only a little English and French, so for five years her husband has been the family's only wage-earner.
"It's a terrible situation - the worst that can happen to a family," she said in Spanish. "Your imagination is running wild, and you feel completely incapacitated. And then there are the financial pressures that seem crass to think about in a moment like this, but by necessity, you can't help it."
Prégent wasn't from a wealthy family, she said; he simply worked as hard and saved as much as he could to afford the private flying lessons that let him, in the end, fulfill his boyhood dream.
His two teenage girls from a previous marriage and elderly parents, who live an hour's drive north of Montreal, are taking things badly, she said. "The uncertainty for them is unbearable."