Word: kidnaper
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...addition, insurance brokers and some officials say governments themselves sometimes pay ransoms - especially on land in kidnap-heavy countries like Nigeria, Mexico and Venezuela - despite insisting that they do not. In 2001, for example, the Dutch government paid $1 million to free a doctor working for the aid organization Doctors Without Borders (MSF) who had been kidnapped by Chechen rebels; the government later tried to recoup the money from MSF. "Ransoms are certainly being paid," Antonia Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, said in an e-mail on Friday. "Of course...
...hostages who are seized along with vessels, and the crews are usually released with the ships when the ransoms are paid. "Paying ransoms is not illegal," says Guillaume Bonnissent, a special risks underwriter for Hiscox Insurance Co. Ltd. in London, which writes about two-thirds of the world's kidnap-and-ransom insurance policies, known in the industry as K&R. In fact, insurance companies never pay ransoms themselves, in part because insurance companies are often banned by law from doing so. Instead, the companies whose workers or vessels are seized pay, and then claim back the money under their...
Here is how the system works, according to kidnap-and-ransom experts who agreed to talk to TIME: Within minutes of a vessel being seized by Somali pirates (or foreign oil workers being nabbed in Venezuela or Nigeria) the crew alerts its company headquarters. There, officials call the company's insurer, which then contracts a "response company" - private firms, like Control Risks in London or ASI Global in Houston, which are generally staffed by former military personnel experienced in hostage situations, and whose day rates can run to thousands of dollars, according to insurance brokers. Those companies begin negotiations with...
...delivering ransoms to Somali pirates; insurance brokers say that's only about three companies. "The money is concealed in large floating plastic containers, and flown by air and dropped," says Mike Regester, an insurance broker for the London company Cooper Gay, which covers oil and shipping companies for kidnap and ransom. "Then the pirates go out and pick it up," he says...
...insurance brokers say that ships are protecting themselves as best they can: many vessels are encased in barbed wire and crews often use high-powered water hoses to try to ward off oncoming pirates. Kidnap experts say the pirates are increasingly skilled at seizures; they say they were astonished last November when the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star was seized, since its side had been regarded as too high for pirates to scale. The pirates finally released the ship and its crew two months later, after a security company dropped $3 million in cash over the Indian Ocean. "Even with...