'The kids were screaming... we could have been shot': Getaway driver in Nine's botched child abduction reveals his terror as Beirut plot unravelled

The Lebanese driver who escorted Sally Faulkner and her children to a safe house after the botched child abduction in Lebanon earlier this year has told of the moment the crying and screaming children were forced into the back of his car.

Khaled Barbour was hired to drive Ms Faulkner, the 60 Minutes cameraman and two ‘recovery’ team members to a suburb in south Beirut, where Ms Faulkner’s estranged partner Ali Elamine lived, Australian Story reported.

The group had planned to snatch six-year-old Lahela and four-year-old Noah from the care of their unsuspecting grandmother and their maid as they walked to school in Saint Therese.

Mr Barbour remembered seeing the cameraman filming the situation.

“I was surprised, what kind of filming is this?” he told the ABC program.

"The kids were yelling and screaming, and the foreigners were yelling."

With the distressed children in the car, panic set in for Mr Barbour as witnesses of the abduction began running towards the car.

"I saw people running, neighbourhood folk, I think, running at the car," he said. "It was my fear that got me out of there."

Speeding through the streets of Saint Therese – a tightly-controlled area where “everyone has a machine gun” according to Mr Barbour – he admitted he was fearful that the vehicle would be shot at.

"The army has orders to shoot any car going towards a checkpoint opposite the traffic, and at the blind speed I was going the army would have shot," Mr Barbour said.

"If the army had shot at the car, no one would have gotten out alive."

Ms Faulkner and her two children arrived at a safe house in Lebanon, where the 60 Minutes crew left her with local woman Yasmine Hamza.

Ms Hamza said she had no idea about the abduction until she saw it on the news that evening.

With nowhere to go and no way to contact the crew, Ms Faulkner begged Ms Hamza to let her stay overnight.

"We didn't know what we were supposed to do," Ms Hamza told Australian Story.

"I can't throw a woman with her kids out onto the street. Our hands were tied."

Ms Faulker claimed it was desperation that drove her to become involved in the plot.

"Before it all went horribly wrong, I genuinely felt that I was doing the right thing," she told the show last week.

In her first major interview since the failed kidnapping, Ms Faulker accused her ex-husband of taking Lahela, then 10 months old, after an argument about her giving a glass of water to a painter at his parents' home in Lebanon.

As she prepared to leave, Ms Faulkner handed the baby over for a last cuddle with her grandmother, who instead took Lahela inside the house.

"My eyes just widened, my heart started beating faster," Ms Faulkner said, her voice breaking.

"I said, 'What's going on?, and he said, 'Lahela's staying here'."

Despite her protests, Ms Faulkner left Lahela and spent a tearful two hours driving with her husband to their Beirut apartment.

He left and returned two weeks later with her passport, saying: "You're going, Lahela's staying here."

Ms Faulkner flew home to Brisbane without her baby.

It was three months before Mr Elamine returned Lahela to Ms Faulkner, who forgave him and agreed to move back to Lebanon.

When the couple's son Noah was nine months old, Ms Faulkner returned to Brisbane with her children after a spate of bombings in Beirut.

The couple agreed to split but signed a parenting agreement, with Ms Faulkner keen for Mr Elamine to remain part of the children's lives.

Then in 2015 she trusted him to take the children on holiday to Lebanon.

During a Skype video call to her children, Mr Elamine delivered a chilling message.

"He looked at me and said, 'Plans have changed', and that's when every part of me wanted to fall apart," she said.

Mr Elamine told her: "This is what's going to happen. Lahela's not coming back, Sally. She's staying here with me. All right? Lahela and Noah."

While she had won custody of the children through the Family Court of Australia, the orders weren't recognised in Lebanon.

Ms Faulkner looked into child recovery agents, but couldn't afford the $80,000-$150,000 fees.

Then 60 Minutes called, she said, saying they were "willing to pay for the recovery if they had the story".

The Nine Network paid former Australian soldier Adam Whittington, who ran a child recovery agency, to return the children to Mrs Faulkner.

"I personally didn't have any doubts," she said. "I wholly and solely trusted what he was about to do."

The failed plan resulted with Ms Faulkner, Mr Whittington and two of his colleagues charged with kidnapping.

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