Noela Rukundo of Melbourne, Australia, was
horrified to learn that her jealous husband had paid to have hit men
kill her. Luckily, her abductors decided not to go through with it.
Noela Rukundo
Washington Post Screenshot
Noela Rukundo of Melbourne, Australia, got the last laugh after her husband plotted to have her killed by hit men.
According to the Washington Post,
Rukundo waited in a car outside her home on Feb. 22 of last year, the
same day as her “funeral,” watching the mourners who had come to console
her husband leave. When she spotted her husband, she stepped out of the
vehicle.
“Is it my eyes?” she remembered him saying in horror. “Is it a ghost?”
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” she quipped.
Her husband, Balenga Kalala, was obviously not pleased, since he was
the one who had ordered a team of hit men to kill his wife five days
earlier in Burundi. The surprisingly kindhearted men had told him that
the deed was done—when, in fact, they had released her.
So there Rukundo was, surprisingly solid when her husband reached out
to touch her shoulder to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
“I’m sorry for everything,” he said.
Too little, too late. Kalala was arrested, pleaded guilty and was
sentenced to nine years in prison for incitement to murder, according to
the Post.
And again, it was all because of three pretty nice hit men who decided to let her go.
Rukundo’s tale began when she flew from Melbourne to her native
Burundi with her husband to attend her stepmother’s funeral. Distressed
by the day’s events, she had retreated to her hotel room, but her
husband suggested she go outside for fresh air.
When she went outside, she was held at gunpoint.
“Don’t scream,” she remembered one of the men saying. “If you start
screaming, I will shoot you. They’re going to catch me, but you? You
will already be dead.”
Terrified, Rukundo followed instructions, allowing herself to be put
in a car and blindfolded. Several minutes later, she was escorted into a
building and tied to a chair.
When the men told her about her husband’s plot, she laughed, thinking
that they were lying. Surely her husband of 10 years would not betray
her that way.
“You’re a fool,” they told her before making a call to her husband, who issued the order to “kill her” while on speakerphone.
Rukundo said that she fainted, the Post notes.
“I knew he was a violent man,” Rukundo told the BBC. “But I didn’t believe he can kill me.”
But Kalala had a dark past, having fled a rebel army that tore apart
his village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, killing his then-wife
and young son. When he met Rukundo 11 years ago in Australia, he already
had five children. The couple would go on to have three children
together.
Luckily for her, the men hired to kill her did not believe in killing
women, and they knew her brother. They explained that they would keep
the hit money and tell her husband that she was dead. Two days later
they set her free on the side of a road with a cellphone, recordings of
their phone conversations with her husband and receipts for the 7,000
Australian dollars they’d been paid.
“We just want you to go back, to tell other stupid women like you what happened,” they reportedly told her.
With the help of her church pastor in Australia, Rukundo was able to
return to Melbourne without alerting her husband before confronting him
the night of Feb. 22.
“I felt like somebody who had risen again,” she told the BBC.
Kalala at first denied all accusations but then later confessed during a phone conversation that authorities secretly recorded.
“Sometimes devil can come into someone, to do something, but after
they do it they start thinking, ‘Why I did that thing?’ later,” he said,
begging for forgiveness. All of this because he reportedly thought that
she was going to leave him for another man, an accusation that Rukundo
denies.
“Had Ms. Rukundo’s kidnappers completed the job, eight children would
have lost their mother,” Victoria Supreme Court Chief Justice Marilyn
Warren said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “It was premeditated and motivated by unfounded jealousy, anger and a desire to punish Ms. Rukundo.”
Meanwhile, Rukundo is trying to return to some kind of normalcy. But
she now has eight children to raise alone and has asked the Australian
Department of Human Services to find her a new place to live. She has
also faced backlash from Melbourne’s Congolese community for reporting
her husband. She said that someone is leaving her threatening messages.
She got home one day to find her back door broken.
And at night, when trying to go to sleep, she still hears her husband’s voice saying, “Kill her.”
Nonetheless, Rukundo tries to remain strong. “I will stand up like a
strong woman,” she said. “My situation, my past life? That is gone. I’m
starting a new life now.
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