Doubt over ‘sex-slave’ model’s kidnap tale
The British model who told cops she was abducted by a sex-slave ring bizarrely went shoeshopping with one of her kidnappers — triggering doubts about her story, reports said Monday.
The troubling detail came as it also surfaced that her kidnappers gave her talking points when she dealt with the press after her abduction — an apparent bid to gain publicity.
Chloe Ayling, 20, burst into tears when authorities asked her about the shopping excursion, which occurred during her six days of reported captivity at the hands of at least two violent kidnappers, according to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
A source described as a close friend of Ayling’s told the Mail Online that she went on the shopping trip because “during the kidnapping, [she] lost her shoes.’’
Her lawyer said she was under the psychological control of her captors and feared being harmed if she didn’t go along with what they wanted.
But the Italian newspaper said, “That the kidnapping was real . . . is not put into question by the investigators. But it is also tremendously true that many details do not add up.’’
Ayling has told authorities she met one of her kidnappers, Lukasz Pawel Herba, at a photo shoot several months earlier.
He and at least one cohort then allegedly set up a fake photo shoot in early July to lure her to an abandoned shop in Milan. There, the thugs drugged and bound Ayling, stuffed her in a trunk and held her at a remote farmhouse with plans to peddle her to a deep-pocketed Middle Eastern buyer, she told police.
The pair only freed her after looking her up on the Web — and seeing heartwarming Instagram photos of the would-be sex slave with her young son, Ayling told police.
Ayling was eventually dumped at the British consulate and Herba was quickly apprehended.
An “agreement’’ allegedly written by the shadowy online “Black Death” syndicate and later found on Herba’s computer threatened to “eliminate’’ Ayling if she helped lead cops to all her captors and didn’t stick to a “predetermined’’ script when it came to media interviews, Britain’s Independent newspaper said.