A man who was kidnapped aged 19 and found 26 years later in Algeria over the weekend had only been a few minutes’ walk away from his family the whole time.

But the man – named as Omar Bin Omran – never cried out for help because he was convinced that his captor had cast a magic spell on him, local reports said.

Omar vanished during the decade-long Algerian civil war of 1998, leading his family to assume that he was killed in the conflict between the North African nation’s government and…

A man who was kidnapped aged 19 and found 26 years later in Algeria over the weekend had only been a few minutes’ walk away from his family the whole time.

But the man – named as Omar Bin Omran – never cried out for help because he was convinced that his captor had cast a magic spell on him, local reports said.

Omar vanished during the decade-long Algerian civil war of 1998, leading his family to assume that he was killed in the conflict between the North African nation’s government and…