Race against time to stop abduction
POLICE CAUGHT MAN WITH CHILD ON PLANE IN MADRID
A POLICE officer has told of the race against time to track down an abductor fleeing the country with a child.
Detective Sergeant Simon Harrison, one of the police team who worked on the case, has spoken for the first time about the incident after he and the team received Nottinghamshire Police’s One Team Award.
He revealed: “We were notified of an incident our uniformed colleagues had responded to where they found a victim.
“Sadly she was tied up by her legs and her hands, and her mouth was bound with tape.”
The officers were told a young child had been abducted by a man who climbed in through a window at a Nottingham home in the early hours with an imitation firearm.
The woman in the house screamed as she saw the man in her bedroom and he pointed the fake gun at her.
He jumped on top of her and held a hand over her mouth to stifle the screams.
Nottingham Crown Court heard she was bound and gagged for around seven hours.
The man took the child to Heathrow Airport and caught a flight bound for Madrid.
On Thursday, November 14, 2019, a 45-year-old man was jailed for 15 years with an extended period of three years.
His accomplice, a 43-year-old woman, was jailed for seven years.
They both pleaded guilty to abducting a child, making threats to kill, false imprisonment and having an imitation firearm.
The accomplice waited around seven hours before alerting police and then posed as a victim in the abduction, claiming she had acted under duress at the hands of the licence man.
Through border agencies, police confirmed the man’s plan to board a second flight to Algeria once he reached Madrid.
Nottinghamshire Police worked with Spanish authorities to arrest the man with seconds to spare before the connecting flight took off from Madrid.
Detective Sergeant Harrison, who works from Radford Road Police Station, said they worked with the National Crime Agency and Interpol “trying to desperately get a message to the Spanish authorities that we needed to act quickly and detain the suspect and prevent the child from going to Algeria, because, I think, if they had got to Algeria it would have been very difficult to get this particular child back.”
When the suspect and child boarded the flight to Algeria, Spanish authorities entered the plane and found the child – who is now safe – and the man was extradited back to the UK.
She was tied up by her legs and hands, and her mouth was bound with tape
DS Simon Harrison