At least three Americans were kidnapped by militants in southern Baghdad on Saturday, according to several American and Iraqi news outlets. An unnamed official of the city’s police force confirmed the group’s disappearance to The Washington Post on Sunday evening, but their precise identities, and why exactly they were kidnapped, were initially unclear:
Matthew Muller, the prime suspect in a California kidnapping that’s become known as the “Gone Girl” case because police initially believed the victim faked the crime, agreed to tell a reporter a few things “off the record” in a jailhouse interview. One of those things was apparently that he did it, Wired’s Kevin Poulsen reports.
Back in March, a 29-year-old Vallejo, Calif., woman disappeared from her home, and her boyfriend was left tied up and drugged with a note demanding a ransom for her return. Suspicion initially fell on the boyfriend, but when the victim returned two days later and refused to cooperate with investigators, authorities thought she may have staged the whole thing, a la Gone Girl. Which brings us up to this week, when a real suspect has been charged with the “hoax” kidnapping.
Michigan state troopers pulled over a 41-year-old man on suspicion of drunk driving early Wednesday morning after they saw him swerving across the road. It didn’t take them long to find the real reason he’d been driving erratically, though: a 22-year-old woman he’d just met through Craigslist was tied up in his backseat, kicking at him while he drove.
A 33-year-old South Africa man says three women forced him into a car at gunpoint Tuesday, then made him drink an unknown, erection-inducing drug and raped him. They allegedly collected his semen in plastic bags, which they stored in a cooler. When they’d taken what they wanted, he says, they abandoned him in a field near Port Elizabeth and drove away.
When a suburban Seattle man's sister asked him to watch her boyfriend's two-year old, he naturally agreed. And at first, it was no big deal.
According to reports, a group of gunmen suspected to be affiliated with the Islamist group Boko Haram raided a village in northeastern Nigeria last week, killing dozens of people and kidnapping over 100 others.
Holy hell, this is harrowing. This past weekend, Delorean, an electronic-pop act from Barcelona, performed at the Mexican installment of the Mutek Festival and on Monday morning, they were still at their Mexico City hotel when an emergency call came in, urging them to vacate the premises due to a shootout. They complied—and were taken hostage.
Rabbis teach. Rabbis counsel. Rabbis lead. Rabbis support. Rabbis... kidnap and, uh, torture?
The hormonal instinct of two strapping young lads from Texas to scope out the woman in the backseat of the car next to them reportedly saved that woman from an unknown fate at the hands of a kidnapper.
