Italian police stop child kidnapping ring
Print Edition
Italian police have dismantled an international ring of ex-special forces accused of plotting to kidnap children caught up in custody battles, using high-speed boats and a base in Sicily to smuggle their charges across Europe.
Investigators discovered “contractors, for the most part veterans of special corps from the armed forces, ready to offer their operational skills to whoever was willing to pay them handsomely enough,” police said in a statement yesterday.
The contractors, operating behind the Norwegian security service ABP World Group, “offered services including the ‘retrieval’ of children caught up in custody battles between parents of different nationalities.”
Armed with Russian weapons, pepper sprays and tasers, the group charged “tens of thousands of euros” to kidnap children given in custody to one parent in order to reunite them with their other parent, “putting the child’s life at risk,” the statement said.
The first operation took place in October 2012 when the group kidnapped a child in Tunisia and smuggled him into Norway, via Palermo in Sicily.
Police arrested three Italians and a Ukrainian woman. Warrants were also issued for two Norwegians and a Swede.
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