Kidnapped model: I feared for my life
BRITAIN: A British model has described how she was drugged, handcuffed, gagged and put in a bag in the boot of a car by kidnappers who then tried to sell her as a sex slave in an online auction.
Chloe Ayling, 20, has given an account of her week-long ordeal after she was taken by balaclavaclad men and chained to a chest of drawers in a remote Italian farmhouse.
As she returned to Britain yesterday, Ayling, who works as a glamour model and has posed for page three in a tabloid newspaper, said that she feared for her life ‘‘second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour’’.
Her captors claimed to be part of an online organisation called ‘‘Black Death’’ and threatened to sell her on the ‘‘deep web’’ if her agent failed to pay a ransom of US$300,000. But they eventually released her because she had a young child which was ‘‘against the rules’’ of their kidnap gang.
She was told that she would probably by trafficked to the Middle East where, once the man who bought her bored of her, she would be passed on to someone else or fed to tigers.
Lukasz Pawel Herba, 30, a Polish national who lives in the UK, has been arrested by police and confessed to the kidnapping.
His home in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, has been raided by officers.
Ayling told Italian police that her agent had booked her a photo shoot in Milan on July 11 but when she turned up at the studio she was attacked.
‘‘A person wearing black gloves came from behind and put one hand on my neck and one on my mouth to stop me from screaming,’’ she said.
‘‘A second person wearing a black balaclava gave me an injection in my right forearm. I think I lost consciousness. When I woke up I was wearing a pink bodysuit and the socks I am wearing now.
‘‘I realised I was in the boot of a car with my wrists and ankles handcuffed, adhesive tape on my mouth. I was inside a bag and was only able to breathe through a small hole.’’
As she screamed for help she was driven to the tiny hamlet of Borgial near the French border where they forced her to lie on the floor next to a chest of drawers and handcuffed her hands and feet to the legs, leaving her ‘‘totally immobilised’’.
‘‘They watched me, they stopped me from fleeing and they threatened to kill me if I did,’’ she said.
‘‘I didn’t want to eat until July 14 as I was so stressed,’’ she said. ‘‘I didn’t trust what I was being offered.’’
They had taken compromising photographs of her whilst she was unconscious which were posted on the dark web with the view to auctioning her off.
She told police she had met Herba a few months earlier on a shoot that was aborted in Paris.
Ayling said yesterday: ‘‘I’ve been through a terrifying experience. I feared for my life, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour.’’
‘‘I am incredibly grateful to the Italian and UK authorities for all they have done to secure my safe release.’’ - Telegraph Group