The parents of Lewis aid worker Linda Norgrove who was killed after a botched rescue mission in Afghanistan quietly spent the first anniversary of her abduction at their home in Uig yesterday .
Ms Norgrove, 36, from Uig on Lewis was kidnapped by insurgents on September 26th in a remote part of the volatile eastern Kunar province where she was supervising development schemes.
Two weeks later she died from a fragmentation grenade thrown by an US commando who
was unaware of her precise location during the dark and confusion of a bid to free
her from a remote mountain top hideout in Kunar province during an US-
Her father John Norgrove said: “This last year has been a very, very difficult one.
“What we’ve tried to do over the past year, is turn a very negative situation into something positive and to react positively to it so that something good came out of something which, for us, was as bad as could be imagined.”
Lorna Norgrove, Linda’s mother, said that setting up the Linda Norgrove Foundation which provides help to poor Afghan women and children has been a big help.
So far the charity has invested nearly £23,000 into development projects including teaching improvised Afghan women to read and write and provide basic arithmetic lessons to girls, an issue Linda desperately wanted to improve.
The Norgroves plan to visit Afghanistan at some point in the future because “We want to see the outcomes of the charitable work and to meet the charity workers.
“But we’re not going to visit the compound where Linda was killed because we both have no desire to, Even if we wanted to go there it’s too dangerous.”
The family are busy preparing for a fundraising 6k run around the shore and hills of Uig, an event Lorna plans to take part in.
She explained scores of people across the world plan to take part in a charity 10K run in their daughter’s memory. The long distance element of the event allows supporters to run a six miles distance on the same day as the Lewis race.
Lorna said interest has been expressed from a Stornoway man working at Mount Everest base camp, a fellow Aberdeen University student friend of Linda’s who is working in the Antarctic, as well as a colleagues of their daughter in Uganda.
She added: “We’ve got a lot of people who are doing it in the States, Canada, Indonesia, but we’re also hoping for people to turn out here in Uig on the day.
Norgroves mark one year since daughter’s kidnapping 27/9/11
Linda Norgrove’s parents are busy with the charity set up in her memory