AFTER PAYING FOR MY MURDER,MY HUSBAND ORGANIZED MY FUNERAL THINKING I WAS DEAD

Neola

An Australian woman has described how her partner hired hitmen to murder her because he falsely believed she had been unfaithful, and his shock when she arrived home during an unofficial wake he organised, assuming she was now dead.

“When I get out of the car, he saw me straight away,” said Noela Rukundo of Balenga Kalala, with whom she had three children. “He put his hands on his head and said, ‘Is it my eyes? Is it a ghost?’” Rukundo told him: “Surprise! I’m still alive!”

The tale began early last year when Rukundo returned to her native Burundi for her stepmother’s funeral. Unknown to her, Kalala, a refugee to Australia from Democratic Republic of Congo, suspected her of infidelity and had paid about £3,5000 to hitmen in Bujumbura, Burundi’s main city.

A subsequent court case in Australia, at which Kalala was jailed for nine years, heard that the men eventually decided they could not kill a woman, also sparing her as they knew Rukundo’s brother.

In an interview Rukundo, who has five other children from an earlier relationship, said she heard her partner order the kidnappers over the phone to murder her.

The ordeal began, she said, after Rukundo, who was in Melbourne looking after all her children, phoned her at her hotel to suggest she step outside for air. When she did so a man with a gun bundled her into a car, where she was taken to a building and tied to a chair.

Rukundo said she initially had no idea what was happening. She told the BBC: “They ask me, ‘What did you do to this man? Why has this man asked us to kill you?’ And then I tell them, ‘Which man? Because I don’t have any problem with anybody.’ They say, ‘Your husband!’ I say, ‘My husband can’t kill me, you are lying!’ And then they slap me.”

The kidnappers called her husband to say they had his partner and seek his instructions. They put the phone on loudspeaker, and she heard the reply: “Kill her.” 

“I heard his voice. I heard him. I felt like my head was going to blow up,” she said. “Then they described for him where they were going to chuck the body.” At this point she fainted, but was spared. The kidnappers also gave her recorded phone conversations and money transfer receipts proving Kalala’s plan.

Five days later she returned to the family home to find fellow members of the local African community consoling Kalala, who believed she was dead.

“I felt like somebody who had risen again,” she said .

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