I just look at him and said 'Surprise! But Ms Rukundo was very much alive. Outlining the details of the case after Kalala had pleaded guilty to one charge of incitement to murder, Mr Trapnell said Ms Rukundo had flown to Burundi on January 21, 2015, to attend her stepmother's funeral and visit relatives. The court heard Balenga wanted his wife dead because he suspected she was cheating on him. "A man, when he come close to me [I see] he have a gun," she said, recounting the ordeal. One of the kidnappers called Kalala on February 18 and told him in Swahili how they had completed the "big job" for him. "She works for us, she feeds us, she clothed us and she was doing the same thing for [Kalala]... 
 
 "I looked at him (in court) but I couldn't see a man.  'Heartbroken' wife of husband who paid hit men to kidnap, murder her in Africa recalls hearing him order hit in phone call 
 
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 A Melbourne woman says she has forgiven her husband after he had her kidnapped at gunpoint in Africa and tried to have her killed, but has come under attack from her community for going to police. The court heard Congolese-born Kalala paid almost $7,000 to a group of kidnappers to kill Ms Rukundo. While Ms Rukundo was in Burundi, Kalala, of Kings Park, was at home looking after the couple's three children and his partner's five children from a previous relationship. The Congolese forklift operator from Kings Park, who arrived in Australia in 2004 as a refugee, paid almost $7000 to the kidnappers but they eventually freed his de facto and the mother of his three children, Noela Rukundo, because they did not kill women. To prove that her husband was indeed the person behind the plot, the kidnappers rang him on speaker phone. Before leaving Noela by the side of a road, the gang handed her the evidence they hoped would incriminate Kalala - a memory card containing recorded phone conversations of him discussing the murder and receipts for the Western Union money transfers. Balenga Kalala, who arrived in Australia in 2004 as a refugee, paid almost $7,000 to a group of kidnappers to kill the mother of his three children, Noela Rukundo, when she was attending her stepmother's funeral in Burundi in early 2015. He had been telling friends in his local African community in Melbourne's west how his wife had died in a tragic accident in Burundi, and they had rallied around him to offer significant financial support to help him and the children. They told her her partner had paid for her to be murdered, but because they did not want to kill a woman, and they knew Ms Rukundo's brother, they would not carry out the killing. She said people should expect protection from the partners, not violence. Man who had de facto kidnapped in Africa murder plot jailed in Melbourne 
 
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 A Melbourne man has been sentenced to nine years' jail for having his de facto wife kidnapped at gunpoint in Africa and trying to have her murdered because he suspected she was cheating on him.
– Noela Rukundo had been with her husband, Balenga Kalala, for 11 years when, last year, she flew from their home in Melbourne, Australia, to her native Burundi for her stepmother's funeral. While there, Kalala ordered gang members to have her killed. They abducted her and told her what they had been hired to do; Rukundo even heard her husband's voice on speakerphone telling them to kill her, the Australian Broadcasting Company reports. The gang members decided not to murder her because they knew her brother and they didn't believe in killing women, but they kept Kalala's money and told him the job was done. She was able to get back home, where, on Feb. 22, 2015, she walked up to Kalala after her own funeral; he'd told everyone she died while in Burundi. "Is it a ghost?" the scared man, who has since been sentenced to nine years for incitement to murder, per the ABC, asked. Rukundo tells the BBC her husband touched her shoulder to make sure she was real, then began screaming. He apologized, but she called police—and, though Kalala first denied he'd had anything to do with Rukundo's ordeal, she ultimately got him to confess while police secretly recorded one of their phone calls, the Age reports. His explanation to her? He thought she was going to leave him for someone else. "Sometimes Devil can come into someone, to do something, but after they do it they start thinking, ‘Why I did that thing?’ later," he reportedly said. The couple has three children together, and Rukundo also has five from a previous relationship. Since her ordeal, she says, some members of Melbourne's Congolese community have threatened her for reporting Kalala, who is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo.