Yes. This woman crashed her own funeral. All to surprise her husband who hired bounty hunters/killers to have her murdered. But, in an unexpected twist of fate she escapes and has lived to tell her story! This one is like a real life Taken only in reverse. Hit the jump!
Her name is Noela Rukundo. As she waited in a car outside her home at her funeral, she watched over as the last mourners had left. Then she got out and stood before her husband’s face, much to his horror.
“Is it my eyes?” she recalled him saying. “Is it a ghost?”
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” she replied.
Five days prior, he ordered a team of hit men to kill Rukundo, his wife for 11 years. The only problem was, they only told the man they killed his wife, but never actually did. They even got him to pay a few extra thousand dollars.
Rukundo has recalled that her now incarcerated husband had to touch her shoulder to make sure she was real. Once he felt her, he started screaming in a panic. “I’m sorry for everything,” he cried.
Although, the story commenced about a year ago.
Rukundo had flew from her home in Melbourne with her husband, Balenga Kalala, to attend a funeral in her native Burundi. Her stepmother passed and the service left her distraught. She went to her hotel room in Bujumbura, to lay down in bed, when her husband called and told her to go outside for some fresh air.
Which she did – but when she opened the door she stared down the barrel of a gun. The man told her: “Don’t scream. If you start screaming, I will shoot you. They’re going to catch me, but you? You will already be dead.”
Rukundo did as she was told, got into a car blindfolded, and headed to her expected death for a near half hour car ride. She was than brought into a building and tied to a chair.
The hitmen than asked her:
“You woman, what did you do for this man to pay us to kill you?”
“What are you talking about?” Rukundo demanded.
“Balenga sent us to kill you.”
She told them they were lying and they laughed at her.
“You’re a fool,” they told her.
There was a man on the other end of a phone call in the background, when her husband’s voice came through the phone’s speaker and said:
“Kill her.” Rukundo fainted after hearing this.
After awaking from her unconsciousness, the men comforted her by saying they do not believe in killing women and they also knew her brother. But they said they would keep her husband’s money and tell him that she was dead. After two days, 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 in Australian dollars they allegedly received in payment.
Before the gang members drove away they told her:
“We just want you to go back, to tell other stupid women like you what happened.”
She than sought help from the Kenyan and Belgian embassies to return to Australia. Then she called the pastor of her church in Melbourne and explained to him what happened, to him helping her return.
Back home, Kalala told the community that his wife had died in a tragic accident and everybody mourned her at the family’s home. Once everybody left, Rukundo than approached her evil husband. She’s stated: “I felt like somebody who had risen again.”
Initially denying all involvement in the crime, Kalala ultimately confessed on a phone conversation with his wife, when police secretly recorded the confession.
Kalala is quoted as saying:
“Sometimes Devil can come into someone, to do something, but after they do it they start thinking, ‘Why I did that thing?’ later.”
Kalala was found guilty and sentenced to 9 years in prison. Rukundo really backs up the saying ’til death do us part’.
