*A woman who was supposed to be dead – at the hands of hitmen hired by her husband – showed up at her own funeral to confront her “widower,” leaving him in complete shock and screaming for her to forgive him.
“I felt like somebody who had risen again,” says Noela Rukundo of Melbourne Australia, who had returned to her native Burundi to attend her stepmother’s funeral when she was taken by gunmen outside of her hotel.
They held her for two days, during which they called the man with their payment – Balenga Kalala, Noela’s husband and the father of her three youngest children.
The caller secretly put the phone on speaker so that Noela, in disbelief that her husband was behind this, could hear his voice. When the gang told Kalala that they had his wife, Noela heard her husband say: “Kill her.” Just hours earlier, the same voice had consoled her over the death of her stepmother and urged her to “get some fresh air” outside the hotel.
“I heard his voice. I heard him. I felt like my head was going to blow up,” Noela told BBC.com. “Then they described for him where they were going to chuck the body.”
But instead of killing her, the gunmen decided to let her go. Noela said the gang leader told her, “We don’t kill women and children.”
“We give you 80 hours to leave this country,'” Noela says the gang told her. “‘Your husband is serious. Maybe we can spare your life, but other people, they’re not going to do the same thing. If God helps you, you’ll get to Australia.'”
Before leaving Noela by the side of a road, the gang handed her the evidence they hoped would incriminate Kalala – a memory card containing recorded phone conversations of him discussing the murder and receipts for the Western Union money transfers.
Below, BBC.com details how Noela got herself back to Australia – and what happened when she showed up at her own funeral to confront her husband:
Noela immediately began planning her return to Australia. She called the pastor of her church in Melbourne, Dassano Harruno Nantogmah, and requested his help.
“‘It was in the middle of the night. I says, ‘It’s me, I’m still alive, don’t tell anybody.’ He says, ‘Noela, I don’t believe it. Balenga can’t kill someone!’ And I said, ‘Pastor, believe me!'”
Three days later, on the evening of 22 February 2015, Noela was back in Melbourne.
By now, Kalala had informed the community that his wife had died in a tragic accident. He had spent the day hosting a steady stream of well-wishers, many of whom donated money.
“It was around 7.30 p.m.,” Noela says. “He was in front of the house. People had been inside mourning with him and he was escorting a group of them into a car.”
It was as they drove away that Noela sprang her surprise.
“I was stood just looking at him. He was scared, he didn’t believe it. Then he starts walking towards me, slowly, like he was walking on broken glass.
“He kept talking to himself and when he reached me, he touched me on the shoulder. He jumped.
“He did it again. He jumped. Then he said, ‘Noela, is it you?’… Then he start screaming, ‘I’m sorry for everything.'”
Noela called the police who ordered Kalala off the premises and later obtained a court order against him. Days later, the police instructed Noela to call Kalala. Kalala made a full confession to his wife, captured on tape, begging for her forgiveness and revealing why he had ordered the murder.
“He say he wanted to kill me because he was jealous,” says Noela. “He think that I wanted to leave him for another man.”
She rejects the accusation.
In a police interview, Kalala denied any involvement in the plot. “The pretence,” wrote the judge at his trial in December, “lasted for hours.” But when confronted with the recording of his telephone conversation with Noela and the evidence she brought back from Burundi he started to cry.
Kalala was still unable to offer any explanation for his actions, suggesting only that “sometimes [the] devil can come into someone to do something but after they do it, they start thinking, ‘Why I did that thing?'”
On 11 December last year, in court in Melbourne, after pleading guilty to incitement to murder, Kalala was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Read Noela’s entire detailed account at BBC.com.
Listen to the Washington Post’s interview with Noela below:
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