Matthew VanDyke is the founder of SOLI, a US-registered non-profit that says it provides free military training, advice and supplies to forces fighting authoritarian regimes and terrorists. (Illustration Suvajit Dey)

17 min readOct 28, 2026 12:07 PM IST First published on: Oct 28, 2026 at 07:42 AM IST

On March 13, 2011, a 30-year-old American from the city of Baltimore was ‘struck on the head’ in an ambush near the oil-rich  Libyan town of Brega and woke up a prisoner of Muammar Gaddafi. He spent the next 166 days in solitary confinement.

Exactly 15 years later the man – Matthew Aaron VanDyke – was arrested by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) at the Kolkata airport. The same day, six Ukrainians – Hurba Petro, Taras Slyviak, Ivan Sukmanovskyi, Marian Stefankiv, Maksim Honcharuk and Viktor Kaminskyi – were arrested in a coordinated swoop from the Lucknow and Delhi airports.