Almost every night, Lurata Lyon wakes up screaming. It’s been 30 years – but when she closes her eyes at night, she relives the terror all over again.
‘I need to sleep with a light on or make sure I see the sun as I wake up, otherwise I’m in frantic mode and reliving my nightmare,’ the now 45-year-old tells me.
Lurata was 15 when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Two years later, when her Serbian village of Veliki Trnovac was singled out for ethnic cleansing, she somehow managed to survive a massacre and cross the border into Kosovo.
She was 17 when she reached the capital of Pristina and had no idea if her parents were dead or alive. One night, after seeking refuge in the quiet corner of a bar, a pair of UN police officers found her and took her to a shelter, where she stayed for weeks.
Lurata thought her nightmare was over then – but one day while stepping out to buy a magazine, a black van skidded out of nowhere and stopped directly in front of her.
What happened next was like something out of the movie Taken – the thriller about a teenage girl kidnapped for sexual slavery by a gang of human traffickers.
She was suddenly grabbed by two men who shoved a black sack over her head. It all happened so quickly, she barely had time to scream.
Hurled with a thud into the back of a van, she remembers the screeching tyres as her captors sped off while her mind raced at a hundred miles per hour.
Lurata Lyon (pictured at 17) was kidnapped in Kosovo in the 1990s
‘It was all so fast, I didn’t have time to process it. What followed was a complete nightmare,’ adds Lurata, who now lives in Spain.
Upon their arrival at their destination, she was dragged, shaking with fear, into a building and forced to kneel in front of a 40-year-old man who was introduced as ‘the Boss’.
When the sack was removed from her head, she realised she was surrounded by men. Immediately, she assumed the worst was about to happen.
‘Please don’t,’ she begged them. ‘I’m a virgin.’
The Boss told his men to back off, making a skin-crawling excuse about how someone so ‘pure’ like Lurata should ‘not be touched’.
It wasn’t much of a reprieve. Instead of being violated herself, she was forced for weeks to watch unconscious women endure sexual abuse.
In between these vile ‘shows’, she was made to live with the Boss and his lover in their apartment.
‘It was so disgusting,’ she adds.
Lurata is now a motivational speaker after surviving the horrific ordeal as a teenager
‘I saw unconscious women being abused by men. That will haunt me for the rest of my life because I couldn’t do anything to save them or myself.’
Revealing she was a virgin may have saved her from being ‘broken in’ by the sex-trafficking gang during her first day of captivity – but they vowed something far worse would soon happen to her.
‘We’ll sell you to the highest bidder, then they’ll return you to us when they’re done with you and you’ll be used for prostitution,’ one of the men told her, his eyes full of anger and hate.
‘Once you no longer have any value to us, we’ll take your organs to be sold on the black market.’
By this point, Lurata didn’t need it spelled out to her. She knew what was happening.
She had heard about girls vanishing, only to be sold to rich men as sex slaves, then discarded. Some would be found working the streets years later; others were never seen again.
After four weeks in captivity, Lurata was told they had found a buyer and she was driven to the Albanian border where, she was told, the deal to sell her would be completed.
In a remarkable stroke of good fortune, however, the border was closed because of the war. Bundled in the back, she overheard officials denying her captors access.
The car turned around and started to drive back. After a month of hell, she could have wept tears of joy, had she not been terrified of what might happen next.
‘I’ll never forget that because it changed the course of my life. It’s the reason I’m alive today,’ Lurata says of the aborted border run.
Back in Pristina, the Boss was furious about the deal-gone-wrong. In a fit of rage, he ordered one of his henchmen to kill her.
The man assigned the task was young – barely older than her – and looked like a ‘normal guy’. Sensing he was less cruel than the others, she asked him to give her a moment to pray before she died.
He agreed, saying he would give her a few minutes while he went to the bathroom.
She prayed hard, telling her parents she was about to die but was at peace. Then her last, lonely whimpers were interrupted by a ‘cling’ sound.
The man had left his gun and the front door key on the table before going to the bathroom. Tiptoeing silently, she grabbed both and bolted for the door.
As she turned the key, she could hear the man coming back. When he started yelling, she knew she’d been caught – but by then she was out the door, screaming bloody murder as she ran straight for the nearest street.
Just like the incident at the border, Lurata was blessed with another stroke of good luck that changed the course of her life. In the blur of the daylight, with the roar of the gangster behind her, she saw a police car parked in the distance.
An officer had climbed out of the vehicle and was coming towards her.
Suddenly, a gunshot rang behind her. She had escaped captivity but was now in the middle of a firefight between her captor and a lone policeman.
‘I was caught in the middle and crawling on the ground trying to reach the police officer. He pulled me behind the car and called all units on his walkie-talkie,’ she says.
For several minutes that felt like hours, the two men exchanged gunfire as bullets whizzed past Lurata’s ducked head. Then came the sirens – backup had arrived. Soon the area was surrounded, and she was finally safe.
Hours later, she finally felt steady enough to give a witness statement at the police station. In the meantime, officers had swarmed the apartment and found a mountain of evidence of human trafficking and sex slavery.
Traumatised but grateful to be alive, she began the journey back to Serbia, desperately hoping to find her parents.
Miraculously, they were safe and hiding in the basement of their family home.
But their reunion was short-lived – Lurata’s nightmare wasn’t over yet.
Within hours, Serbian soldiers had descended on her village – and they weren’t there to provide assistance. Instead, they were thugs in uniform.
In desperate need to bolster their ranks, the army had resorted to conscripting men from prisons – rapists, killers, you name it – and they were treating the war like a sadistic playground. Mistaken for a traitor, Lurata was grabbed from her home and kept in solitary confinement for six months.
Her experiences there were so horrific, her mind has blanked most of them out.
‘I was raped every day and psychologically abused. The men played games; they would drag me out of the room, spraying me with scalding or freezing water. They would beat me one minute, then brush my hair another. It was torment,’ she says.
‘I just kept thinking I wanted to return to my parents – that gave me the strength and will to survive.’
After she was taken away, Lurata’s father never stopped looking for her. Eventually, with the help of police, he managed to rescue her from the rogue army.
Lurata is pictured as a baby with her parents. After escaping her captors, she had a vanishingly brief reunion with her family before she was captured by the Serbian army – whose ranks were filled with violent criminals – under suspicion of being a traitor
‘My father was shocked when he saw the state I was in – skin and bones. He just said everything was going to be okay.’
Finally safe, the magnitude of what she had survived began to hit the 17-year-old, who would later be granted asylum in the UK.
‘I was really suicidal initially. The pain, the torment, the PTSD was so extreme that it was really hard for me to even trust doctors,’ she tells me.
‘It’s tough because it never goes away for me. I had to learn how to trust humanity again. The British government gave me a second chance at life and I realised everyone was trying their best to help me regain my strength.
‘I met people who I’m still friends with today, including my best friend who’s bizarrely from Kosovo. He was the first person I trusted in the UK and the first person I told my story to.’
Little by little, Lurata started to trust others again, but she still remains suspicious of anyone she meets.
‘Even today, when I travel, I don’t trust anyone. I suffer tremendously with anxiety and it can be triggered when I’m tired, if I can’t reach my loved ones, or if I read about current wars in the news.’
Today, Lurata is a single mother who has worked hard to educate her two children about the dangers of the world, and how to treat women properly.
She is also a motivational speaker and hosts retreats in Spain for people of all ages that focus on both physical and mental challenges.
Lurata’s father died in April this year, leaving her heartbroken, but her mother is still alive and they have a beautiful relationship.
‘He was my true hero. Before he died, he said: «Never stop your mission to make this world a better place for generations to come.» I will continue to do this for the rest of my life.’
In 2023, Lurata released a book to share her story titled Unbroken: Surviving Human Trafficking, with proceeds going to charity to stop human trafficking
