Word: ransoms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...they were military. After the demise of Colombian drug cartel bosses like Pedro Escobar, the FARC stepped into the vacuum and earned hundreds of millions of dollars each year protecting traffickers as well as the growers of coca, cocaine's raw material. The guerrillas earned just as much via ransom kidnapping - they're estimated to hold more than 700 Colombian army, police and civilian hostages today, including three U.S. defense contractors whom the FARC abducted...
...North Korea’s (HRiNK) Awareness Week. Unfortunately, Choi’s moment of joy passed quickly. Choi had been held against his will by a man who had convinced him to travel with him to see Choi’s mother. Instead, Choi was held for a ransom of $50,000. It was only after the customers at his exiled mother’s restaurant in South Korea raised $30,000 that the man released Choi, allowing him to travel to South Korea to be with his mother. Choi, who is now a high school student...
...killed at least 100 people and driven thousands more to join the country's swelling refugee population - already estimated at more than 1.5 million. Meanwhile, aid groups have found themselves targets in the fighting across the country, from the north, where foreign reporters and volunteers have been held for ransom by gangs, to the south, where they've been executed to show the low regard their Islamist captors have for the West...
...most recent high-profile incidence of piracy off the lawless coast of Somalia appears to have ended well for everyone but the pirates. After holding the French luxury yacht Ponant for a week and allegedly securing a $2 million ransom from its owner, a band of Somali marauders headed for shore on April 11 with its booty. That's when French navy commandos pounced to free the 30-man crew and, in a dramatic helicopter raid, hunt down the six pirates. They now await charges in Paris...
...examining alleged similarities between the case and a storyline from a British television drama series, Shameless, shown less than a month before the 9-year-old vanished. In that episode, the head of a dysfunctional family staged a fake kidnap of his son in an attempt to obtain a ransom...