AT FOUR in the morning on New Year’s Day, Ahmad Ihbasheh, 15, silently let himself out of his father’s house in the West Bank city of Nablus to run the gauntlet of Israeli tanks and snipers.

It was the start of a nailbiting journey that ended last week in his home town of Barry, South Wales, with an emotional reunion with the mother he had not seen for 3½ years. Ahmad had dreamt of seeing Eileen Sutton again ever since his father took him, his brother and his two sisters against their will to live in the Palestinian city, one of the world’s most dangerous places.

He planned his escape carefully but told no one, not even his older sister, Fatima. Although he was made to work in his father’s bakery he was never given any wages. Nonetheless, over three months he managed to scrape together 100 shekels (£13).

He persuaded his father to let him have his British passport, telling him that it was the only way he could get to school through Israeli checkpoints. He lulled his father into a false sense of security. “I had to pretend to him that I liked living there,” he said. “He thought I loved it but all the time I dreamt about escaping and coming home.”

The night before he left he wrote a letter to Fatima explaining why he was running away, then hid the keys to the front door before going to bed in his clothes. Long before any of the numerous relations who shared the house were awake he let himself out of the front door into 24th Street. He took only the clothes he had on, some treasured photographs and a small piece of bread.

Having fled the house, Ahmad had more than an angry father to worry about. On previous occasions he had been shot at by Israeli troops for being on the street during the curfew. He cautiously made his way to the bus station, where he had made arrangements with a friendly bus driver the previous day. Three Israeli checkpoints later, at any one of which he could have been hauled off the bus by suspicious soldiers, he arrived in the town of Ramallah, from where he was able to take a taxi to Jerusalem.

He made his way to the British Consulate, where the story of the Ihbasheh children who had been uprooted from their home in South Wales and kept virtual prisoners in Nablus was well known. An order by a British court awarding custody to their mother is not recognised by the Palestinian authorities and consular staff had been powerless to help in the face of refusal by their father, Kamal, to let them return.

It was a different story when Ahmad turned up there on New Year’s Day and said that he wanted to go back to Wales. Officials telephoned his mother and asked what she wanted them to do with him. “Send him home!” she told them.

At ten the following morning Ahmad was driven to Tel Aviv. An hour after he left, his father, who had already called the consulate three times, arrived in Jerusalem determined to take his son back. But he was too late, and on Friday Ahmad was with his mother, having been flown by British Airways to Heathrow.

“It was brilliant to see her again,” he said yesterday. “It’s so good to be back in Barry after living in a war zone. Maybe I didn’t appreciate it so much before, but I do now.”

Ahmad, Fatima, 17, Maryam, 12, and Amjad, 10, were abducted by their father during a family visit to Nablus in 1999. Their parents had married in 1980 when Mr Ihbasheh was running a restaurant in Cardiff.

Five years ago he decided he wanted to return to his home town. Miss Sutton, who has reverted to her maiden name since her divorce, said: “He just upped and went, leaving me to live on income support with four kids and a mortgage. But I thought it was important for the children to grow up knowing their father and three years ago I agreed to take them to visit him and his family in Nablus.”

The day before they were to return home, their father took them to a burger restaurant for a goodbye meal. Ahmad said: “We went to a park, then about 11 o’clock we were taken to my aunt’s house where we were locked in a room. We spent three days in the room. We couldn’t get out because there were bars on the window.”

Other members of the family told the children’s mother how shocked they were and said that they had no idea where the children had been taken. Miss Sutton said: “Then Kamal’s brother frogmarched me to the airport and virtually forced me on to the plane.”

Their father said that there was a problem with the children’s British passports, but as weeks turned into months Miss Sutton realised that he was never going to allow them to return to Wales.

They were living a primitive existence in a house in Nablus occupied by their grandparents, three uncles and their families, their father and his new wife and their five children. The household, which included more than 30 children, most of them under seven, was ruled by Ahmad’s grandmother.

Ahmad said: “We didn’t see much of my father because he was working in the bakery all day and went straight to sleep when he came home.”

When Nablus was occupied by Israeli troops last April, the family were trapped in the house for 22 days. For a week the property was taken over by Israeli soldiers for use as a command post while the family took refuge in two small flats on the lower floors. They lived on bread made with just flour and water because it was too dangerous to venture out.

Ahmad said: “It was a war zone. There were guns and missiles going off all over the place. If you went outside the Israelis would shoot at you.”

On one occasion he was waiting to be let into the house after a shift in the bakery when an Israeli armoured car came down the street. He said: “The soldiers just got out and started shooting at me so I had to bend down and run for my life. I had to take refuge in a friend’s house because our front door was locked.”

Miss Sutton, PA to the director of a property company, lives in hope that one day her other children will return home. After all, she never expected to see Ahmad again.

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