Word: ransoming
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...overseer, controls a French conglomerate comprising 150 companies with 130,000 employees and annual sales of $4.7 billion. The kidnap vehicles and the Peugeot were found abandoned. Was Empain the victim, in the current European terminology, of a kidnap à 1'italienne, engineered by professional criminals purely for ransom, or of a kidnap à l'allemande, pulled off by terrorists trying to force the release of jailed compatriots...
Cranks purporting to represent various groups claimed responsibility. But it was soon clear that the kidnap was à 1'italienne. Along with a ransom demand reported to be $20 million, the kidnapers sent the baron's family a letter written by him and his identification card, plus further proof that they held him: a bit of flesh from a fingertip...
What persuaded the late oil billionaire J. Paul Getty to pay $2.9 million in ransom for his kidnaped grandson Eugene Paul Getty II was the 17-year-old's right ear. His Calabrian kidnapers had cut it off and mailed it to a Rome newspaper with threats of further mutilations. Last week young Getty, now 21, was working in Southern California on documentary films and no longer self-conscious about that ear. A new ear of tissues taken from his own body is in process of being sculpted at Stanford University Medical Center...
...average of eight out often of these crimes, or 13% more than in 1976, remained unsolved. Kidnaping, more often for profit than political motives-but occasionally for both -reached a record total of 76 in 1977. Since 1970, kidnapers have netted $175.5 million in ransom money...
...Industrialist Hanns-Martin Schleyer, the terrorists have not yet given up or gone underground. Last week Austrian police disclosed that members of the Red Army Faction were responsible for the kidnaping in November of Viennese Millionaire Walter Palmers. He was released unharmed after his family paid a $2 million ransom, but the German Red Army members who engineered Palmers' abduction once again made good their escape. One Austrian official speculated that they were "probably somewhere between Libya and South Yemen...