Lives in Captivity: dark history, #4

By Phillips Tahuer

Kidnapping (illegitimate deprivation of liberty) is one of the most heinous crimes against people.

The reasons are very varied:

• receive a ransom

• Reckoning, revenge.

• Ritual acts, including totalitarian sects.

• Solve personal or political problems.

• Kidnapping children for sale to childless families.

• Using humans as blood or internal organ donors

• Porn business, prostitution.

• Slavery.

• Criminal acts of maniacs.

Very often, kidnappers torture, rape, subject to moral, psychological, and narcotic influences or kill their victims.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ediciones Afrodita
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215098592

Book preview

Introduction:

Kidnapping (illegitimate deprivation of liberty) is one of the most heinous crimes against people.

The reasons are very varied:

• receive a ransom

• Reckoning, revenge.

• Ritual acts, including totalitarian sects.

• Solve personal or political problems.

• Kidnapping children for sale to childless families.

• Using humans as blood or internal organ donors

• Porn business, prostitution.

• Slavery.

• Criminal acts of maniacs.

Very often, kidnappers torture, rape, subject to moral, psychological, and narcotic influences or kill their victims.

Kidnapping is always a carefully planned and well-prepared multi-stage operation. Criminals try not to kidnap random victims. Abduction can occur anytime and anywhere, most often where a person's eyelid is least protected. Most of the kidnappings happen in the morning when people leave their houses. Criminals can lure or forcibly drag the victim into the car. To facilitate the solution to the problem, criminals use uniforms: military, police, doctors, and false documents. Many kidnappers are friendly, they do not seem dangerous, people often like them, and they can calm the watchful eye of the victim, taking advantage of her kindness, gullibility, and naivety.

Cocktails mixed with sleeping pills, bunkers and chains, drugs, slavery - all this is reminiscent of the plots of the movies. But similar stories happen in real life. Every year, thousands of people are kidnapped around the world, sometimes children. Some of them manage to escape and return to their families after a few weeks, months, or even years... others do not.

When a child is kidnapped, the police have approximately a forty-eight-hour window to find him, before the chances of finding him alive drastically decrease. More often than not, after this forty-eight-hour window, the kidnapper has unleashed his murderous side of him, and the worst fears are usually confirmed when these missing bodies are found days or weeks later.

However, what happens to these children after the forty-eight-hour mark, if they are not killed by their captors?

For this book, I have selected the 30 most outstanding cases due to their worldwide media coverage. They are true stories about those who were imprisoned and went through the toughest trials. Some were kidnapped on the way to school or work, others were kidnapped right out of bed, and some didn't even have to leave their home.

Abductions in alphabetical order:

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Aldo Moro

Aldo Moro (1916) was twice Prime Minister of Italy, fulfilling this position for a total of six years. He was one of the most important leaders of the Italian Christian Democracy

His body was found in the trunk of a red Renault 4 on May 9, 1978, fifty-five days after his kidnapping. He was curled up under a blanket, with eleven bullets in his heart. The place where they left him was strategic: he was 150 meters from the headquarters of the Communist Party and two hundred from that of the Christian Democracy, his party. Even today many doubts and enigmas surround the most exalted murder of modern Italy.

Nine in the morning of March 16, 1978: that day the parliament would have voted its confidence in the fourth government of Giulio Andreotti, which for the first time would have had the support of the Italian Communist Party. Four members of the Red Brigades, a revolutionary terrorist organization, dressed in the uniforms of Alitalia pilots, ambushed the president of the Christian Democracy Aldo Moro, and his escort. During the shooting, the terrorists killed the five members of the escort and kidnapped the politician to take him to a hideout in the capital. The news shocked the country, which spontaneously took to the streets to demonstrate.

For almost two months, more precisely fifty-five days, an intense debate raged in Italian society about whether or not to negotiate with the terrorists. During the kidnapping, Moro himself managed to communicate with the country's highest political circles. Indeed, on March 30, his kidnappers published a letter addressed to Francesco Cossiga, then Minister of the Interior. In the letters sent to his fellow party members, Moro reproaches his refusal to negotiate his release, an attitude influenced, in his words, by other people. According to the Catalan journalist Enric Juliana, Moro's kidnapping became a Greek tragedy: the anguish of human survival in the face of the reason of State. Only the Italian Socialist Party declared itself in favor of exploring the path of negotiation.

On March 25, the Red Brigades issued a statement in which they announced their intention to determine the direct responsibilities of Aldo Moro for which, with criteria of proletarian justice, he would be judged. The term judged set off alarms in all institutions and security agencies. In fact, Moro had been a foreign minister and twice head of government, so he had confidential information and knew state secrets that could be related to secret services and governments of other countries.

The kidnapping of the president of the DC kept all the world powers in check. At that time, a game was being played in Italy that could have changed the course of US policy in Europe, ending up involving the US secret services and the Vatican itself. Everything related to the Moro case seemed confused, and this is also why, from the beginning, public opinion mistrusted the government's poor efforts to find the kidnappers and free the politician.

On April 18, the story took an unexpected turn. A statement appeared announcing the execution of DC President Aldo Moro, by suicide. It was also claimed that his body lay in Lake Duchessa, near Cartore (in Rieti province). After the initial commotion and two days of unsuccessful investigations, the Red Brigades sent a new statement in which they denied responsibility for the previous message and attributed it to specialists in psychological warfare. To prove the veracity of their statements, in the same press release they attached a photograph of Moro holding the newspaper la República the day before.

During all the time that he remained as a hostage, Aldo Moro was imprisoned in a hidden room behind the bookstore of an apartment via Montalcini 8 in Rome, guarded by the leader of the Roman column, Mario Moretti, and by Prospero Gallinari, Germano Maccari. and Anna Laura Braghetti. On Tuesday, May 9, 1978, Franco Tritto, Moro's assistant, received a phone call informing him that he would find the body of the Honorable in via Caetani. The body was discovered around two in the afternoon in the trunk of a car, riddled with bullets. With this cruelty, the long kidnapping ended and the way was opened to questions that still do not find answers today.

Until a few years ago, it was believed that the material author of the murder of Aldo Moro was Próspero Gallinari, but in October 1993 Mario Moretti confessed that it was him: I would not have allowed someone else to do it, he said. Other circumstances added to the mystery: during the autopsy sand was found on Moro's clothes and even some coins in his wallet. In any case, in none of the five trials held against thirteen members of the Red Brigades, involved, it was possible to clarify all the darkest points of the investigation.

Despite the 13,000 mobilized police officers, the 40,000 raids, and the 72,000 roadblocks,