British model played no part in own kidnapping, insists lawyer
Chloe Ayling’s Italian attorney pours scorn on ‘evil’ speculation that she was part of plot
CLAIMS that a British model was involved in the plot to kidnap her and sell her as a sex slave were “evil”, her lawyer said yesterday.
Chloe Ayling’s account of her week in the hands of a shadowy online gang called the Black Death seem “incredible”, Francesco Pesce admitted, but he insisted the facts were true and accepted by Italian police and lawyers.
Miss Ayling, 20, says she was drugged, handcuffed and stuffed in a suitcase in a car boot before being driven to a remote Italian farmhouse where she was held for a week.
She was later told by her abductors that the kidnap had been a mistake as she had a young son.
Lukasz Pawel Herba, 30, took her to the British consulate in Milan to release her. The day before her release she had been spotted shoe-shopping with Herba, who is being held in a high security prison in Milan.
Herba claims that he was drawn into the kidnapping scheme unwittingly and did it to raise money to fund his leukemia treatment, according to an Italian police deposition. When he learned of the gang’s true intentions, he claims that he backed out of the plot.
Mr Pesce told the BBC: “I have heard people doubting her and implying that she was somewhat involved in this because it was too easy an escape and I really cannot believe that people think that about Chloe Ayling, she was subject to a tremendous ordeal and she suffered so much and she had to relive this once, twice, three times.
“How could you think that she was involved in this? That’s just evil.”
Miss Ayling, who friends say has wanted to be a glamour model since the age of 15, returned to the UK and was due to appear in her first Page 3 shoot since her release yesterday.
However, the photoshoot was cancelled after she hired celebrity agent Mark Cowne, whose clients include Desmond Tutu, Sir Bob Geldof, Alan Yentob and Claudia Schiffer. Her former agent Phil Green, who kidnappers had contacted to demand a ransom of $300,000 (£270,000), said he was “shell shocked” and had been unable to contact Miss Ayling.
But he also dismissed speculation that she had any involvement in the kidnapping, saying: “I would certainly defend her by saying first of all that we had a flight booked on July 11 and she had paid for her own flight to fly to Ibiza the next evening. But the third thing that completely blows that out of the water is that she would never agree to having her photograph taken without her being completely made up, and instead a photograph was taken of her and put out when she was drugged and completely unconscious.
“She certainly would never have agreed to that.”
A photographer going by the name Andrew Lazio – whom they now know to be Herba – had originally booked her for a shoot, purporting to be with a motorbike brand, in Paris on April 21. But the night before she was due to meet him at the studio, policeman Xavier Jugelé was shot dead on the Champselysées in an Isil-inspired attack.
He cancelled the shoot claiming his equipment had been stolen, only to meet her later in the day to give her some expenses for the day.
Mr Green believed he “ticked all the boxes”, but now thinks the Paris ‘shoot’ was cancelled as there were too many police swarming the area.
It is understood that police in Italy are hunting for at least one accomplice in the abduction.