Tara Brown And 60 Minutes Crew On The Way Back To Australia

The 60 Minutes crew headed by journalist Tara Brown who have been imprisoned in Lebanon for the past two weeks are on their way back home to Australia after being freed from custody.

Brisbane mother Sally Faulkner has also been released, and it is understood she will return to Australia in the next few days and is remaining in Lebanon to attend a custody hearing.

They had been imprisoned  after being charged with kidnapping-related offenses following a botched attempt at abducting Ms Faulkner’s two children, Lahela, 5 and Noah, 3 off a Beirut Street on 7th April.

Ms Faulkner was attempting to recover her children to take them back to Australia, claiming that her estranged Lebanese husband, Ali Elamine, took them for a three week holiday to Lebanon last May, and then failed to return them.  It’s alleged that Channel Nine had paid an international child recovery company $115,000 to snatch the kids, and the 60 Minutes crew were with Ms Faulkner to film the recovery.

Reaching A Deal

Negotiations over the past two weeks had appeared to stall and it was being reported that they could all face between three and 20 years in prison.

However following around three hours of negotiations last night Australian time, Mr Elamine dropped the charges against his wife because he said he didn’t want his children to think that he’d left their mother in jail.

It has been reported by various news outlets that Channel Nine paid “compensation” to Mr Elamine –  rumoured to be anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to an amount in the low millions -to drop the charges against the 60 Minutes crew. However Mr Elamine has denied this, and told the Kyle and Jackie O show this morning that he didn’t receive “a dime”.

Ms Faulkner has agreed that she will relinquish custody rights to Mr Elamine and will be allowed to visit with the children either in Lebanon or another country, but not Australia.

Mr Elamine said outside the court:

‘I am glad it’s over. She is their mother and I don’t want them growing up and thinking ‘Daddy had the option of letting Mummy off easily and he didn’t,’ he said.

‘It sucks, the whole thing sucks. No one wins here … I told Sally she can come and go as she wants. She is the mother. The only thing we can do is cooperate to give them a better future.

‘They don’t know what has been happening these last two weeks … I couldn’t tell them anything.’

Unfinished Business

They are Adam Whittington who is a joint British-Australian citizen and Craig Michael a Brit who lives in Cyprus, both employees of Child Abduction Recovery International (CARI) and two Lebanese locals who were hired as freelancers for the job.

According to the ABC, Whittington and Michael’s lawyer Joe Karam said that Channel Nine should have included his clients in the deal, as the TV network had hired them to do the job.

“They came here based on instructions from Channel Nine, who paid for their trip and let’s say program or plan, and they were altogether arrested in this case of child abduction,” he said.

“My client believed that he was assisting a mother to help get back her children. She had a court order from Australia.

“I would have preferred that Channel Nine to push and include in their settlement the people they paid to help them in this process, in this plan,” he said.

It is understood that Tara Brown and her crew will arrive home in Sydney later tonight (Thursday) local time.