The two kidnappers evade Karla by tossing a spare tire into a busy highway and causing a pile-up and then threatening to kill Frankie with a knife. Karla learns the female captor's name is Margo through a recording from her son's toy. She purposely attracts the attention of a police officer on a motorcycle and explains the situation to him but the kidnappers kill him. Margo talks to Karla, requesting $10,000 in exchange for her son. Margo enters Karla's car and tells her to follow her accomplice's car. In a dark tunnel, Margo attacks Karla, who fights back and throws Margo out of the car. The other captor threatens to hurt Frankie, forcing Karla to stop following him.
Minutes later, Karla comes across a traffic jam and finds the Mustang abandoned. She is told by a passerby that the male driver and Frankie are now traveling on foot. Karla goes to a police station to report the kidnapping but, taking note of the number of missing children that are never found, decides to take matters into her own hands. She spots the male kidnapper in a stolen black Volvo V70 and attempts to stop the vehicle, but fails to do so, she chases him until her vehicle runs out of fuel. She tried to hitch a ride from a motorist, but they are blindsided by the Volvo and the good samaritan dies. The male kidnapper emerges from his car with a shotgun, but Karla manages to kill him by pinching his arm against the door frame of her minivan, and disabling the van's parking brake, causing the van to go downhill, offroad, while still holding on to the man's arm, after a few seconds, the minivan crashed into a tree, killing the man. She finds his identification card that contained his address. There, she calls 911 and locates Frankie in a barn with two kidnapped girls. She and her son run away, promising to come back later, and hide underwater after Margo appears. Karla pulls Margo underwater and drowns her. She returns to the barn and encounters a bearded man claiming to be a neighbor. She realizes he is part of the child kidnapping ring when he mentions how many children were hiding without her telling him. Karla knocks him out with a shovel. The police arrive shortly afterward, and the children are rescued. Karla's actions lead to the dissolution of an international child abduction ring, and she is praised as a hero.
ALIREZA SHAVAROGHI FARAHANI, 50, MAHMOUD KHAZEIN, 42, KIYA SADEGHI, 35, and OMID NOORI, 45, all of Iran, have each been charged with: (1) conspiring to kidnap, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison (Count One), (2) conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and sanctions against the Government of Iran, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison (Count Two), (3) conspiring to commit bank and wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison (Count Three), and (4) conspiring to launder money, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison (Count Four). NILOUFAR BAHADORIFAR, 46, of California, is charged in Counts Two, Three, and Four, and is further charged with structuring (Count Five), which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. The potential maximum sentences in this case are prescribed by Congress and provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by Judge Abrams.
Barry Croft Jr., 47, of Bear, Delaware, was sentenced today to 235 months in prison followed by five years of supervised release for conspiracy to kidnap the Governor of Michigan, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against persons or property, and knowingly possessing an unregistered destructive device, which was a commercial firework refashioned with shrapnel to serve as a hand-grenade.
I learned from FBI. They came to my house and they announced that I am under surveillance. It was quite shocking. You know, the reason many dissident journalists, activists, women, they leave Iran to be safe. So I came here in New York to feel safe because I wanted to do my job. I'm a journalist. I'm just an activist. I'm not a criminal. I'm giving voice to the voiceless people. Well, one day I see the FBI saying that the intelligence service hired a private investigator. They're taking photos of your private life. They're filming your movements and they want to see where you are. They're going to kidnap you from here. We're going to take care of you.
Entrants paid 10 to enter a lottery in the hope of being kidnapped. Ten finalists were chosen at random and put under surveillance. Two winners - Debra Burgess, a 27 year old Australian working as a temp and Russell Ward, a 19 year old from Southend working in a 24 hour convenience store - were snatched in broad daylight and taken to a secret location for 48 hours. The process was broadcast live onto the internet. Online visitors were able to control a video camera inside the safehouse and communicate live with the kidnappers. During the run up to Kidnap, a 45 second video Blipvert was shown at cinemas around the UK.
In the early evening of Tuesday 14 July a kidnap team and a support team travelled to a pub in West London and kidnapped Debra. The following morning the two teams, accompanied by a film crew, arrived in Southend and engaged in a lengthy game of cat and mouse with Russell. Eventually a work colleague helped trick Russell into leaving his house and he was kidnapped as he got into a car.
Last year (1996) there were 1421 kidnappings in Britain, a 700% increase in the last decade. As well as highlighting a current phenomenon Kidnap is about control and consent, the media, theatre and lottery culture. It is a conceptual act, a perversity and a psychological investigation.
The project invites entrants to hand over their lives to strangers for two days. It asks for an act of trust, of abandonment, for faith in the unknown. The psychological bond between kidnappers and their victims is well documented by the Stockholm Syndrome and cases such as that of Patty Hearst. This project will raise this relationship to a new level: one of mutuality, a shared fantasy. The winners may pretend that they are in a real kidnap packed with drama or they may approach their 48 hour trip in a matter-of-fact way, openly acknowledging that a kidnap without coercion is in fact merely a holiday with bells and whistles. The level of make believe is in the hands of the two winners and will be arrived at by some kind of negotiation between them.
Media coverage will fulfil other functions. It will give Kidnap a conceptual function: no one who hears about it will be unchanged by it. They will surely ask who would do such a thing? Why? To most people both kidnapper and kidnappee will seem crazy. But perhaps it will also set off secret chains of thoughts in their minds: what would I give to leave everything behind for a couple of days? They will perhaps be quite attracted to handing someone else responsibility for their life for a short while under very specific conditions. And perhaps one in a thousand might even register. This seeming perversity, an inversion of all normal values, might just set someone onto a different path in life.
In lottery-mad Britain we have already started to see the possible ironies of winning and Kidnap will also niggle away at those doubts. Who is the winner in this scenario and what have they won? Will the person who is kidnapped be ecstatic that they have been chosen or actually terrified by a proposition that they never thought would become a reality? Will their fame or notoriety become a source of joy to them or a headache?
Kidnap is also a performance, a piece of theatre. This is a play with several acts but with improvised scenes and an unknown ending. It is a drama where you pay for the chance to play the lead role. And it is a performance both for the media and for the winners. Those kidnapping will play their roles but will those who have been kidnapped? Perhaps those shortlisted will rehearse for the big moment, practicing being kidnapped in a number of ways. Perhaps they will hone their performances for the most captive audience anyone will ever have: the kidnappers.
The theatricality will be maximised even further by the fact that each entrant will be able to specify a scenario that they would like enacted. They will be able to choose different types of kidnaps that they would like to experience from Son/Daughter Of A Millionaire through to Story At Bedtime. Furthermore Kidnap will be a Pinteresque drama: two strangers find themselves in a locked room for 48 hours. We will document the resulting script.
Kidnap is an exercise in voyeurism and surveillance. The kidnappers are being paid by the entrants to watch them, monitor them and track them. But the kidnappers will also do some voyeurism all of their own. They will crouch in silence watching the winners through two way mirrors. Are the winners OK? How are they getting on with each other? This voyeurism will be extended via the website and the remote site to the world at large. We all like to be the centre of attention: the two winners of Kidnap will have an international audience.
The resulting audio and video tapes will also be a record of an experiment in human interaction with sociological and psychological resonances. As in the work of Sophie Calle in which she followed strangers or employed people to follow her, a strange form of coexistence will develop. In this symbiotic state the winners have given themselves over to the kidnappers and are thus free of self determination. And at the same time the kidnappers have also given up their freedom to the winners. For they are dependent on the winners for the outcome; they can only watch and wait to see what happens.
Background: No study to date has investigated the effects of the trauma of being kidnapped for ransom. In the present study, we aimed to assess the general health status and the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression (MDD) in a sample of kidnap victims. We also focused attention on dissociative experiences and on the development of the Stockholm syndrome during captivity.
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