http://heraldsun.com.au - At 9pm on the evening of April 6 Sally Faulkner was sitting between the two single beds in a small one bedroom “safe house’’ in the shelled out poor area of Sabra in Beirut, desperately ringing the Australian embassy in Lebanon. On the first try no one answered. On the second, a security official said to ring back the following morning when the office was open. Plans to be quickly rescued by Australian officials — and getting some assistance to escape Lebanon — evaporated throughout the night.

How different the saga of the past fortnight may have played out if Faulkner had managed to get inside the embassy grounds and obtain some limited diplomatic protection for her children. Instead, on this first evening back with their mother in nearly a year, Faulkner’s children, five year old Lahela and three year old Noah were sleeping peacefully in the safe house.

It had been the former Brisbane air hostess’ happiest, yet most tumultuous day and she was alternatively resting on pillows, with arms outstretched to cuddle both children or fretting about getting out of the country.

The kidnapping of the children had gone off reasonably well: the Lebanon weightlifting champion and occasional government driver Mohammed Hamza, 26, had scouted the location and organised the rental car, driven by his friend in the Civil Service, Khaled Barbour. Barbour had only been asked the day before if he could help out driving some media around town and never received any payment.

Faulkner had been in the back of the car to reassure the children all was well even though their grandmother Ibtissma Berri was knocked to the ground in the melee, allegedly by the burly Cypriot tattoo artist Craig Michael.

The 60 Minutes cameraman Ben Williamson had captured all of the intense, but quick action near the bus stop in Hadath, the middle of Hezbollah controlled Beirut.

Now crammed with the two children, Barbour drove to the frenetic Beirut suburb of Sabra at the request of a phone call from the chief planner Adam Whittington, a dual Australian and British passport holder who lives in Sweden. Whittington, 40, had been an accomplished but controversial child snatcher, returning children to parents with appropriate custody orders in the previous few years and he believed Faulkner’s orders giving her custody issued in December 2015 from the Australian Family Court were legally binding.

For the past four months Whittington’s Lebanese contact, Mohammed Hamza — introduced to Whittington by Hamza’s older brother who lives in Sweden — researched the area. Whittington sent him the coordinates on a Google map and asked for as much detail about the area as possible. He was to be paid US$500, Hamza said. Around this time Whittington received the first of two payments totalling $115,000 directly from the Channel Nine accounts department.

Barbour’s carload of people and the accompanying vehicle believed to contain the 60 Minutes crew arrived in Sabra. They suddenly imposed themselves on Hamza’s mother, Yasmine and quickly reorganised the room into a mini-studio. She had no notice that a film crew, child recovery experts, a mother and two children would descend on her tiny second floor apartment where five people sleep squeezed into the solo bedroom and on the couch in the lounge room but immediately offered apricot juice.

Alarm bells for Faulkner must have been ringing at this point for the entry into the apartment block is a rabbit warren of dank concrete rubble corridors between two fishmongers, dangling electrical wires and the first impressions don’t improve with a large gag-inducing rotting pile of garbage on the first floor. This was a far cry from the plush $1000 a night of the Movenpick Hotel where the television crew was based, nor the planned three star safe house hotel, the Napoleon in Hamra street.

Undeterred, the crew spent the morning filming the happy reunion inside the Hamza family flat: Sally playing with the kids on the rug, Sally feeding the kids cucumber and chicken, Sally with a beaming smile that didn’t leave her face, and young Lehala squealing with delight that she was to return to Australia. Both Craig and Whittington left once the filming began to get the next stage underway: the planned getaway via the Mediterranean to Cyprus. “Don’t come until I ring,’’said Whittington to the others, who were continuing to film and interview Faulkner.

Around three hours after the snatch Williamson got Faulkner to go out the front into the busy market street which was chaotic and colourful — great background for television — and encouraged her to make a phone call to her husband, Ali Elamine. Mohammed Hamza’s sister Sara was there to watch the action.

Ben said “ring Ali now, tell him the children are with you,’’ Sara told News Corp Australia during a visit to the safe house this week.

That encouragement, perhaps to capture some of drama of the moment, was enacted at 10.50am and was to prove the fatal flaw in the plan.

Across town by this point Faulkner’s estranged husband was already in action.

Immediately after being knocked to the ground and seeing the kidnap car race down the street, Mrs Berri rang her son and he made a flurry of phone calls to the police, then to the Australian embassy and then he tried Faulkner’s phone. He had sensed being surveilled for some months and he had been tipped off that Faulkner was planning to try and grab the children.’’

“She had shopped around before she chose Whittington’s company,’’ Elamine said. He was angry they had succeeded on his patch, just a few hundred metres from his middle class apartment.

“I called the embassy but they didn’t open until 9 o’clock and I couldn’t wait for everything to open, I had to find my kids,’’ he said.

Elamine claimed to be aware Hamza had spent at least two months assessing the area and that the children’s emails had alerted him to a kidnap plot. But Whittington believes another person may have been actively passing on information to Elamine, having been kept in the loop from Faulkner who had been seeking reassurance on some details of his kidnap plan.

As the clock ticked past nine o’clock, Elamine finally received a call back from the Australian embassy and he was asked if Faulkner had a criminal record in Lebanon. He said all he wanted to know was if Faulkner had the kids but the diplomats refused to tell him “so I hung up’’.

By this time Whittington was down at the Beirut marina, finalising the get away motorcruiser Kaboypaki, the boat hired for him in Cyprus by the man alleged to have done the snatch, tattooist Craig Michael.

Those back at the Hamza family flat were waiting for Whittington’s call to make their getaway on the boat. But the calls never came.

Unbeknown to them the conversation between Faulkner and Elamine — all captured by Channel Nine — had been made on a phone registered to Whittington.

“I will let you see the kids if you want, don’t worry Ali,’’ Sally reassured him.

But Elamine was ropeable: “Bring them right back, right back now, its better for you if you do’’.

The police were able to track down Whittington through the phone and his hotel registration and police arrested him on the docks. All they had to do was then wait for the 60 Minutes crew to return to the hotel and walk straight into handcuffs.

First to fall into the trap was Rice who left for the Movenpick around 7.30pm wondering what could possibly have gone wrong. An hour later Brown, Ballment and Williamson had packed up the cameras and departed also, leaving just Faulkner and the children in the flat with the Hamza family.

Just 30 minutes later Faulkner began to panic that she cannot contact Whittington, or any of the 60 Minutes crew and tries that desperate contact with the embassy.

Mrs Hamza tries to reassure Faulkner and lets her rest with the children in the bedroom while the rest of the family sleeps on the two couches in the lounge room.

“Sally didn’t sleep the night. In the late morning she tried the embassy again. She didn’t hear from them so she decided to bath the children but we don’t have any shower, just a bucket so I got some hot water and she started washing the kids,’’ Mrs Hamza said.

At 12.50pm that day just as Faulkner was dressing the children a team of 10 heavily armed police burst into the flat. Mrs Hamza rang her carpenter husband, also called Mohammed, who was working two minutes down the road, but when he entered he too was arrested.

It was, by all who witnessed the police raid, an extremely distressing time.

Mrs Hamza said: “They pulled a gun on me and arrested (son) Mohammed in front of the kids. He had known some of those people who arrested him and four of them were beating him.

“Lahela was screaming and Noah was very upset. Sally was telling the police to stop yelling at her and that she wanted to finish dressing the kids first before she would let them take her and the kids away.’’

The police then organised for Elamine and his brother to pick up Lahela and Noah from the Hadath police station, where he insisted Faulkner not be handcuffed until after he had left.

Mrs Hamza insisted that Faulkner was a loving mother and the children were ‘’really really happy’’ to be back in her presence.

Now two weeks on, Faulkner has left Lebanon a free woman, but shackled by emotional ties, having had to give up custody of the children. Mrs Hamza, who did nothing but try and be a generous host to Elamine’s children, has found her own son beaten in jail and she is too poor to pay his legal costs.

Elamine dropped the charges against the 60 minutes crew and Faulkner, but has refused to drop charges against the kidnap crew and they now face an uncertain future behind bars