For four years and eight months, the Colombian nun Gloria Cecilia Narváez was in the hands of Islamist terrorists in Mali.

The 59-year-old nun was freed on Saturday, as the presidential office in Mali announced on Twitter.

One appreciates the "courage and bravery of the sister," it said.

In the attached photos she was smiling with the Malian interim president Assimi Goita and the Archbishop of Bamako, Jean Zerbo.

"I'm very happy that I stayed healthy for five years, thank God," she said later, according to state television.

Claudia Bröll

Freelance Africa correspondent based in Cape Town.

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The nun from the order of the Franciscan Sisters of Maria Immaculata was kidnapped on February 7, 2017 in the house of her order in the village of Karangasso, 400 kilometers east of the capital Bamako and near the border with Burkina Faso.

According to a report from their superiors, armed men had forced them to hand over the car keys to the Order's ambulance.

The other three residents of the house were spared.

The car was found later.

She had taught children and young people

The nun had been in Mali for many years at that time. In Karangasso she had helped in a large health center of the Order, an orphanage and a center for women and had also taught children and young people. Before coming to Mali, she worked as a teacher in Colombia, Mexico and Benin for a long time. In January 2018, the kidnappers posted a video on the Internet in which the hostage asked the Pope for help.

Islamist organizations and other armed groups have been raging in Mali since 2012. According to the American monitoring organization ACLED, there have been more than 900 kidnappings since 2017. Foreigners in particular are often taken hostage to extort ransom money to finance terrorist activities. Sometimes, however, there was also power struggles between the terror groups behind it, writes the South African Institute for Security Studies. This could have been the case with the kidnapping of Narváez by the terrorist organization Katiba Macina, similar to the case of French aid worker Sophie Pétronin, who was abducted a year earlier and released in 2020, by Al-Qaida fighters. Such “trophy hostages” enabled the kidnappers to better position themselves in the hierarchy of organizations.

Sisters of the order described Narváez as a woman with a special "human quality", who was down to earth and worked tirelessly for the poor.

One sister said she offered herself to the kidnappers in place of two other nuns.

On Saturday evening she had flown from Bamako to Rome, where she was received by Pope Francis before mass on Sunday.