Winnipeg man escapes chaos

'Stable' situation quickly fell apart

The television news was grim, the phone service patchy, and the sound of distant gunfire sliced through the night.

And as bloody crackdowns seized hold of Libya, one Winnipeg family could do little but wait, watch and hope that Peter Kostelnyk would make it home.

Thursday night, they got their wish.

Only hours after escaping the mounting chaos in Libya, Kostelnyk stepped down from the arrival gate at the Winnipeg airport into a jubilant throng of friends, family and media. He embraced his wife and children before turning to the waiting cameras. "I wasn't expecting all of this," the surprised man said.

For 19 years, Kostelnyk split his time between Winnipeg and a small town in Libya, where he worked as an instrumentation technologist for an oil company. That's what he was doing last week, as the wave of popular protests continued to sweep through the Middle East and North Africa.

He didn't suspect it would soon tear Libya apart. "I was telling my wife, 'Libya's quite stable,' " Kostelnyk recalled, noting that the regime of Moammar Gadhafi had held the reins of power in the country for over 40 years.

Then it wasn't.

On Sunday night, as Kostelnyk's wife Tanice Kane worried about reports of escalating violence, her husband reassured her that everything was fine. Later that night, he left her a message: Things were going downhill, fast.

Around the camp where Kostelnyk worked, security quickly deteriorated. He believes some of the security may have left their posts to join the protesters. There were reports of looting, trucks being stolen and fires being lit near the oil wells, Kane said.

The couple was haphazardly in touch, as Internet and phone service fell in and out.

"I just had to sweat it out until I got word that he was in Frankfurt," Kane said. "You just have to hope and believe that everything will turn out OK."

After landing back home in Winnipeg, Kostelnyk said he never felt his life was in danger, even as he listened to the sound of distant gunfire.

Although Kostelnyk knows he won't be going back to Libya for a long time -- Kane "probably won't let me, for one thing," he quipped -- he now worries about his Libyan friends who are still in the country, with nowhere else to go.

Meanwhile, another Manitoba family is in mourning after 18-year-old Mohammed Abdul Hamid was shot and killed while demonstrating peacefully at a funeral Sunday.

"The whole city went to bury (seven) people," said Fawzi Mazek, an orthopedic surgeon living in Winkler. Mohammed was his cousin.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca