With the help of her pastor, Noela Rukundo flew back from her home country, Burundi, to Melbourne, Australia to attend a funeral—her own funeral.
As she approached the place where she was supposed to be buried, Rukundo spotted her husband, Belenga Kalala, who was, as expected, shocked to see her. His surprise, however, was not borne out of longing for his wife. He was, in fact, the one who wanted Rukundo dead.
"Surprise! I'm still alive!" Rukundo recalled telling her horrified husband, as quoted by The Washington Post.
"I felt like somebody who had risen again," she added.
Rukundo would have been really dead, if not for the compassion of the three hitmen hired by her husband to kill her.
Kalala supposedly paid $7,000 Australian dollars to the three men to kill his wife while attending her stepmother's funeral in Burundi. He wanted her dead on suspicion that she was going to leave him for another man.
Rukundo recalled being snatched by the hitmen outside her hotel in Burundi. She was blindfolded and taken to an unknown building by her captors, where she was tied to a chair and questioned by the gunmen.
One of the men hired to kill her asked, "You woman, what did you do for this man to pay us to kill you?"
"What are you talking about?" Rukundo asked, puzzled.
"Balenga sent us to kill you," her captor revealed.
Kalala thought that they were lying, until she heard the voice of her own husband over the phone giving this order: "Kill her." Upon hearing this, Kalala fainted.
"I knew he was a violent man," Rukundo said in a separate interview with BBC. "But I didn't believe he can kill me."
Much to her surprise when she woke up, she was still with her captors. They said they spared her life because they didn't believe in killing women, and because they knew her brother.
Two days after this incident, she was released by her captors, who even handed her a cell phone and phone recordings to prove that it was indeed her husband who paid for her to be killed.
