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A man was arrested Thursday in Ottawa for the 2008 kidnapping of Amanda Lindhout in Somalia.

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The RCMP say Ali Omar Ader was the “main negotiator” in the kidnapping. He now faces Canadian Criminal Code charges, including hostage-taking, and appeared in an Ottawa courthouse on Friday. The RCMP said they made the arrest after a long, complicated investigation titled Project Slype that included undercover officers, wiretaps and surveillance, but offered few details as to how they tracked the Somali in Africa and followed him to Canada.

“This investigation posed a number of significant challenges as it was carried out in an extremely high-risk environment in a country plagued with political instability,” assistant commissioner James Malizia with the RCMP said at a press conference. He said the investigation spanned seven years.

The case could prove a major test for the Canadian courts extraterritorial reach under anti-terrorism provisions passed in the post-9/11 era.

Lindhout was kidnapped in August 2008 alongside Nigel Brennan, an Australian photographer, and their Somali translator and driver, while working as a freelance journalist.

You can only imagine the types of abuse I endured

For fifteen months, she was shackled, starved, beaten and raped before their families paid a reportedly million-dollar ransom — an ordeal she’s detailed in her bestselling book A House in the Sky. The Canadian government was repeatedly criticized for not doing more to aid in her release as she languished in prison and pled through the media for help.