'Victim was in on it'
Model’s ‘kidnapper’: She wanted the $$
The man accused of drugging and kidnapping a British model told an Italian court Wednesday that she helped write her own ransom note.
Lukasz Herba, 30, said Chloe Ayling was in cahoots with him from the get-go, staging her abduction with him in a bid for money and fame, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.
“She was in it with me,” he told the Milan court. “She agreed to my proposal to stage a fake kidnapping because she wanted popularity and we were going to split the money.
Herba said that he met the 20-year-old on Facebook in the summer of 2015 and that she helped him pen a ransom note because his English “isn’t too good,” Britain’s Sun newspaper reported.
“She collaborated. She knew that when all the scandal was over, she would earn a lot of money and publicity,” he said.
Polish-born Herba is accused of drugging the young mom with ketamine when she turned up for a bogus photoshoot in Milan last July, holding her captive for six days and threatening to sell her to a sex-trafficking gang part of a group called Black Death.
But Herba denies he was the lone mastermind behind the plot.
“The kidnap was planned, but it’s complicated and not as the girl says,” he told the court.
When asked by a prosecutor about a line in the ransom note sent to Ayling’s agent, Phil Green, calling himself a “medium-high-level killer with Black Death,” Herba said softly, “That was written with the girl.”
He also denied drugging Ayling.
A police toxicologist testified Tuesday that Ayling’s hair had traces of ketamine, which causes a person to remain conscious but disassociated from reality.
There was also a tiny hole on the model’s wrist consistent with an injection, but there is no way of knowing when the drug was administered.
Ayling’s lawyers have previously called suggestions that her kidnapping was a desperate bid for fame “evil” and told the court the model endured “physical and psychological violence.”
Ayling has been excused from testifying, but Herba’s attorneys are appealing that decision.
Authorities also are seeking to extradite Herba’s brother, Michal Herba, who was arrested in Britain.