Tag Archives: ransom

Haiti gang seeks $1 million per person for kidnapped missionaries

(Reuters) -A Haitian gang that kidnapped a group of American and Canadian missionaries is asking for $17 million — or $1 million each — to release them, according to a top Haitian official.

Justice Minister Liszt Quitel told Reuters that talks were underway with kidnappers to seek the release of the missionaries abducted over the weekend outside the capital Port-au-Prince by a gang called 400 Mawozo.

The minister confirmed the hefty ransom fee, telling Reuters “they asked for $1 million per person.” The fee was first reported by the Wall Street Journal earlier in the day.

CNN reported earlier on Tuesday the kidnappers first called Christian Aid Ministries – the group to which the victims belonged – on Saturday and immediately conveyed the price tag for the missionaries release. The FBI and Haitian police were advising the group in negotiations, the minister said.

Several calls between the kidnappers and the missionary group have taken place since their disappearance, the minister told CNN.

The Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries called for prayers for the “Haitian and American civil authorities who are working to resolve this situation” in a statement.

The group of 16 Americans and 1 Canadian includes six women and five children, including an eight-month old baby, the missionary organization said. They were abducted in an area called Croix-des-Bouquets, about 8 miles (13 km) outside the capital, which is dominated by the 400 Mawozo gang.

Five priests and two nuns, including two French citizens, were abducted in April in Croix-des-Bouquets and were released later that month.

Quitel told the Wall Street Journal that a ransom was paid for the release of two of those priests.

Kidnappings have become more brazen and commonplace in Haiti amid a growing political and economic crisis, with at least 628 incidents in the first nine months of 2021 alone, according to a report by the Haitian nonprofit Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, or CARDH.

Haitians on Monday mounted a nationwide strike to protest gang crime and kidnappings, which have been on the rise for years and have worsened since the July assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

Shops were open again on Tuesday in Port-au-Prince and public transportation had starting circulating again. Transport sector leaders had pushed for the strike, in part because transport workers are frequent targets of gang kidnappings.

The FBI said in a statement on Monday that it is part of a U.S. government effort to get the Americans involved to safety.

Kidnappings in Haiti rarely involved foreigners.

The victims are usually middle-class Haitians who cannot afford bodyguards but can nonetheless put together a ransom by borrowing money from family or selling property.

The growing crisis in Haiti has also become a major issue for the United States. A wave of thousands of Haitian migrants arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border last month, but many were deported to their home country shortly after.

(Reporting by Daniel Flynn, Brian Ellsworth and Gessika Thomas; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Alistair Bell)

Joy as parents reunited with kidnapped Nigerian students

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) – Ninety children abducted from a school in Nigeria were reunited on Friday with their parents after being held captive for nearly three months, part of a wave of mass kidnappings by armed gangs that have spread fear across the north of the country.

“Today is the happiest and most joyful day for me and my family,” said Ali Gimi, whose five children were among those kidnapped from an Islamic school in Niger state on May 30.

“We had lost our joy and happiness. This is like a dream, after I had started losing hope,” he said. “As I am speaking to you, the whole of our family has gathered at my house to celebrate their safe return.”

Authorities say 136 children were initially seized at the school, though some later escaped. One, a five year old boy, died during captivity. The kidnappers had initially said six had died, but this proved to be a lie to scare parents into paying the ransom.

“We suffered terribly in their hands,” one child, Ahmed Mohamed, told journalists. “They tied us up from morning till evening.”

Mass kidnappings of schoolchildren, once a notorious tactic by Islamist militants to intimidate the population, have become a money-spinning industry for armed gangs demanding ransom payments. Authorities say 1,000 children have been abducted since December in northwestern Nigeria.

The 90 schoolchildren, along with two other abductees who were not identified, were released late on Thursday. Parents had sent a total of 65 million naira ($160,000) and six motorbikes as ransom, three parents told Reuters.

In a separate incident on Friday, kidnappers also released 15 students and four staff members who were taken earlier this month from an agricultural college in Zamfara state, a school source told Reuters.

The government has implored states not to pay ransoms, but desperate parents and communities often raise the funds themselves.

“We will do whatever it takes to bring them to justice,” Niger state Governor Abubakar Sani Bello said of the kidnappers. “We have put in place all necessary measures to hunt down and prosecute those involved in this heinous act.”

($1 = 411.0000 naira)

(Reporting By Maiduguri newsroom; Writing by Libby George; Editing by Peter Graff)

Desperate Nigerians sell homes and land to free kidnapped children

By Abraham Achirga and Libby George

TEGINA, Nigeria (Reuters) – After armed men snatched seven of Abubakar Adam’s 11 children in northwestern Nigeria, he sold his car and a parcel of land and cleaned out his savings to raise a ransom to free them.

He sent his 3 million naira ($7,300) into the bush, together with payments from other families in his town of Tegina. The kidnappers took the money, seized one of the men delivering it and sent back a new demand for more cash and six motorbikes.

“We are in agony,” the 40-year-old tire repairman told Reuters, still waiting for any sign of what happened to his children three months after the mass abduction. “Honestly I don’t have anything left.”

Kidnappers have taken more than 1,000 students since December amid a rash of abductions across the impoverished northwest. Around 300 of the children have still not been returned, according to a Reuters tally of reports.

President Muhammadu Buhari has told states not to pay anything to kidnappers, saying it will only encourage more abductions. Security agencies say they are targeting the bandits with military action and other methods.

Meanwhile, hundreds of parents are facing the same quandary: do everything they can to raise the ransoms themselves, or risk never seeing their children again.

“We are begging the government to help,” said Aminu Salisu, whose eight-year-old son was taken in the same daylight raid on Tegina’s Salihu Tanko Islamic school in May, alongside more than 130 students.

Salisu cleared out his own savings and sold everything in his shop to raise his contribution. The owner of the school sold off half the grounds. Together, with the help of friends, relatives and strangers, the people of Tegina said they raised 30 million naira.

But that still wasn’t enough for the bandits.

Kidnappers collected more than $18 million in ransom from June 2011 to March 2020 in Nigeria, according to an estimate by Lagos-based analysts SBM Intelligence.

That flood of cash brought a flood of new kidnappers, said Bulama Bukarti, an analyst in the Extremism Policy Unit of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. He estimated there were currently around 30,000 bandits operating in the northwest.

“It’s the most thriving, the most lucrative industry in Nigeria,” he told Reuters. Kidnapping has become a tempting career choice for young men at a time of economic slump, double-digit inflation and 33% unemployment.

“From December, we saw the Pandora’s box open. They saw it was possible. They saw that nothing happened to the attackers,” Bukarti said.

In December, gunmen kidnapped 344 boys from the Government Science Secondary School in the northwestern state of Katsina during a night-time raid. The kidnappers released the boys a week later, but it set off a spate of similar kidnappings across the region.

The bandits took a page from the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, which seized more than 200 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014. That group had ideological aims and forced some of the girls to marry fighters.

The armed kidnappers in the northwest are motivated by money, experts say.

“A LIFE-AND-DEATH MATTER”

The abductions have piled more pressure on President Buhari, who promised to tackle insecurity at his inauguration in 2019.

They have also tested the security services. The military – pitted against the kidnappers in the northwest, Islamist insurgents in the northeast, separatists in the southeast and piracy in the Delta – is deployed to at least 30 of Nigeria’s 36 states.

Information Minister Lai Mohammed, in an interview with Reuters, defended the strategy not to pay ransoms.

Instead, he said, the government had destroyed multiple bandit camps and tried other approaches to tackle banditry.

He declined to give details, citing the need for secrecy around ongoing operations, but said all levels of government are working to free the children.

“We are winning the war against insurgency and we are winning the war against banditry,” Mohammed said.

The government of Niger state, which includes Tegina, declined to comment. Officials working with the governor said they needed to keep their efforts secret.

Meanwhile, the challenges keep mounting.

The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), an NGO, tracked a 28% increase in violence nationwide in Nigeria in the first six months of 2021, compared with the previous six months.

Reported fatalities from violence nationwide rose 61% to 5,197, it said.

It all explains, Bukarti of the Extremism Policy Unit said, why Adam and other parents are willing to sell everything they have to pay ransoms themselves.

“They cannot afford (it) by any means. But it’s a life-and-death matter. And they know security agencies cannot free their loved ones.”

(Reporting By Maiduguri newsroom and Abraham Achirga in Tegina and Libby George in Lagos; Additional reporting by David Lewis and Camillus Eboh in Abuja; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Colonial Pipeline paid hackers nearly $5 million in ransom – Bloomberg News

(Reuters) -Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5 million to Eastern European hackers on Friday after a crippling cyberattack that shut the largest fuel pipeline network in the United States, Bloomberg News reported, citing two people familiar with the transaction.

The company paid the ransom in untraceable cryptocurrency within hours after the attack, according to the report.

Colonial Pipeline declined to comment.

Whether targets of such attacks should pay to regain control of their systems is a matter of fierce debate. Critics contend that paying ransom encourages attacks.

U.S. House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday ransom should not be paid by companies that are the victims of cyber attacks.

The hackers provided Colonial Pipeline with a decrypting tool to restore its disabled computer network after they received the payment, but the company used its own backups to help restore the system since the tool was slow, Bloomberg News reported.

After a six-day outage, the top U.S. fuel pipeline, which carries 100 million gallons per day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, moved some of the first millions of gallons of motor fuels on Thursday.

The shutdown caused gasoline shortages and emergency declarations from Virginia to Florida, led two refineries to curb production and had airlines reshuffling some refueling operations.

The FBI earlier this week accused a shadowy criminal gang called DarkSide for the ransomware attack. The group has not directly taken credit, but on Wednesday it claimed to have breached systems at three other companies.

A terse news release posted to DarkSide’s website did not directly mention Colonial Pipeline but, under the heading “About the latest news,” it noted that “our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society”.

The White House declined to weigh in on Monday whether companies that are hacked such as Colonial Pipeline should pay ransom to their attackers, but a national security official said it may offer some advice in the future.

(Reporting by Arathy S Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)

Gunmen kill student, kidnap 27 in attack on Nigerian school

By Garba Muhammad

KADUNA, Nigeria (Reuters) – Unidentified gunmen killed a student in an overnight attack on a boarding school in north-central Nigeria on Wednesday, witnesses said, and the regional government said 27 others including some staff and relatives were kidnapped.

The assailants stormed the Government Science secondary school in the Kagara district of Niger state at around 2 a.m., overwhelming the school’s security detail, according to local residents.

One student was killed in the attack, teacher Aliyu Isa and a pupil at the school told local TV news station Channels. Another teacher, who did not want to be named, also told Reuters that one student was killed.

“It was only one that was killed,” Isa told Channels. He said the abductors were dressed in army uniforms and shooting as they broke into the school. “They were telling the students not to run,” added Isa, who said he and others fled in the confusion while the gunmen rounded up some of the pupils.

Niger state officials did not immediately confirm the death but said that 27 students, some members of staff and relatives had been abducted by the gunmen.

The attack came two months after gunmen stormed a secondary school in northwestern Katsina state and kidnapped nearly 350 boys, who were subsequently rescued by security forces.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the latest abduction. Kidnappings for ransom by armed groups are common across many northern Nigerian states.

Militant Islamist group Boko Haram and a branch of Islamic State also carry out abductions in Nigeria’s turbulent northeast. About 100 of more than 270 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram from the town of Chibok in 2014 remain missing.

The Niger state governor ordered the immediate closure of boarding schools in the region. President Muhammadu Buhari dispatched security chiefs to coordinate rescue operations, his spokesman Garba Shehu said in a statement.

“President Buhari has (given assurance) of the support of his administration to the armed forces in their brave struggle against terrorism and banditry and urged them to do all that can be done to bring an end to this saga,” said Shehu.

The spate of attacks has raised concern about rising violence by Islamist insurgents and armed gangs and fueled widespread criticism of Buhari’s handling of national security. In January, the president appointed a new military high command.

Violence and insecurity have compounded the economic challenges faced by citizens in Africa’s most populous country, which is struggling to cope with a fall in revenues due to an oil price slump on top of the COVID-19 pandemic.

(Reporting by Garba Muhammad; Additional reporting by Maiduguri Newsroom, Felix Onuah and Camillus Eboh in Abuja, and Alexis Akwagyiram in Lagos; Writing by Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Timothy Heritage and Mark Heinrich)

Uganda makes arrests in kidnap of American tourist and her guide

U.S. tourist Kimberly Sue Endicott poses with her guide, Jean Paul Mirenge in Uganda, April 7, 2019, in this image taken from social media. Wild Frontiers/via REUTERS

By Elias Biryabarema

KAMPALA (Reuters) – Uganda said Tuesday some suspects had been arrested in connection with last week’s kidnap of an American tourist and her tour guide in a national park while a minister told a local TV that a ransom had been paid to free them.

Tourist Kimberley Sue Endecott, 35, and guide Jean Paul Mirenge-Remezo were ambushed and seized by gunmen as they drove in Queen Elizabeth National Park in the country’s southwest near the border with Democratic Republic of Congo on April 2.

It’s one of Uganda’s most visited parks, home to antelopes, lions, elephants, hippos, crocodile and leopards.

The kidnappers later demanded a ransom of $500,000. On Sunday Ugandan security officials said they had rescued the pair unharmed near the border.

In a statement on Tuesday, police said: “The joint security team actively investigating the kidnapping incident … has made some arrests of suspects, on suspicion of being involved.”

Police did not give details about the suspects but said they had been detained during “raids and extensive searches” in Kanungu district, more than 400 km (250 miles) southwest of the capital Kampala.

On Tuesday, junior tourism minister, Godfrey Kiwanda Ssubi, told NBS TV that a ransom was paid to secure the victims.

“Whatever these people (kidnappers) demanded for was paid,” Ssubi said.

“The money had to be taken … everything was done to save the lives of these people.”

Ugandan security officials had earlier refused to acknowledge the payment despite several reports in local and international media.

The United States has maintained it follows a policy of no concessions to kidnappers although the tour firm that arranged the safari told Reuters the captives were released after a “negotiated settlement” with the assistance of the US government.

In a tweet on Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump urged Ugandan authorities to find the perpetrators and bring them to justice “openly and quickly”.

(Reporting by Elias Biryabarema; Editing by Giles Elgood)

Obama administration denies Iran cash payment was ransom for prisoners

U.S. President Barack Obama answers a question as he and Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong hold a joint news conference at the White House in Washington, U.S.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration said on Wednesday that $400 million in cash paid to Iran soon after the release of five Americans detained by Tehran was not ransom for them as some Republicans have charged.

The five, including Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, were released on Jan. 16 in exchange for seven Iranians held in the United States for sanctions violations. The prisoner deal coincided with the lifting of international sanctions against Tehran.

At the time, the United States said it had settled a longstanding Iranian claim at the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal in The Hague, releasing $400 million in funds frozen since 1981, plus $1.3 billion in interest that was owed to Iran.

The funds were part of a trust fund Iran used before its 1979 Islamic Revolution to buy U.S. military equipment that was tied up for decades in litigation at the tribunal.

“The link between prisoner release and payment to Iran are completely false,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Twitter in response to a Wall Street Journal article that Washington secretly organized the cash airlift.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest heatedly beat back suggestions the money transfer to Iran was ransom, or a secret.

“The United States, under President Obama, has not paid a ransom to secure the release of Americans unjustly detained in Iran and we’re not going to pay a ransom,” he said at a daily White House briefing.

Earnest said the Republicans who have long opposed the Iran nuclear deal are seizing on how the money was paid to Iran as a way to undermine the deal. “They’re struggling to justify their opposition to our engagement with Iran,” he said.

“I understand the interest in details for a more colorful story but I don’t understand what this does to the broader outlines of an agreement that has been in place for six months now.”

While there have long been questions about the timing of the payment to Tehran, one Iranian concern was that the Obama administration would face too much domestic political criticism if it delayed acting on the tribunal’s decision.

Due to the international sanctions against Iran, the payment, made in euros, Swiss francs and other currencies, had to be made in cash.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump blamed his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for launching the talks with Iran.

“Our incompetent Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, was the one who started talks to give 400 million dollars, in cash, to Iran. Scandal!” Trump said in a Twitter post.

Republican National Committee spokesman Reince Priebus also weighed in. “The Obama-Clinton foreign policy not only means cutting a dangerous nuclear deal with the world’s number one state sponsor of terrorism, it also means paying them a secret ransom with cargo planes full of cash,” he said in a statement.

House Speaker Paul Ryan was more measured, saying that: “If true, this report confirms our longstanding suspicion that the administration paid a ransom in exchange for Americans unjustly detained in Iran.”

(Reporting by Lesley Wroughton Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey; Editing by John Walcott and James Dalgleish)

Philippine General urges martial law to rein in southern militants

Hostages Canadian national Robert Hall and Norwegian national Kjartan Sekkingstad are seen in this undated picture released to local media, in Jolo

MANILA (Reuters) – A senior Philippine army general on Wednesday resumed a push for martial law to be imposed on a troubled southern island where Islamist militants beheaded a Canadian captive, despite a recent decision by President Benigno Aquino not to adopt such curbs.

On Monday, militants of Abu Sayyaf, a small but brutal group linked to al Qaeda, executed Robert Hall on the remote island of Jolo, the second Canadian captive to be killed following John Ridsdel, after their ransom demand went unheeded.

“Declare martial law, that is a right move,” said a senior Philippine army general, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

“If you want to immediately solve the problem, there should be a total control by the military in the area.”

Emergency powers were needed because the Abu Sayyaf was using its ransom proceeds to buy the loyalties of the surrounding community, he added.

Aquino said he considered declaring martial law on Jolo three weeks ago but decided against it because there was no guarantee it would work.

“You would need a large force to implement martial law and there is no guarantee it will produce positive results,” he told reporters on a visit to Jolo to inspect troops pursuing Abu Sayyaf militants.

“It might generate more sympathy for the Abu Sayyaf.”

Aquino said he spoke with the prime ministers of Canada and Norway by telephone, thanking them for their understanding and support of his government’s no-ransom policy.

He said he apologized to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the death of Robert Hall and John Ridsdel, who was executed in April.

Trudeau has condemned Hall’s execution, but said Canada cannot, and will not, pay ransom in such cases because it could encourage additional kidnappings.

Abu Sayyaf had initially demanded one billion pesos ($21.7 million) for each of the detainees, but cut that to 300 million early this year.

Hall’s family backed the Canadian government’s policy.

“Our family, even in our darkest hour, agrees wholeheartedly with Canada’s policy of not paying ransom,” it said in a statement.

Abu Sayyaf, based in the south of the mainly Roman Catholic Philippines, is known for kidnapping, beheadings and extortion.

Security is precarious in the southern Philippines despite a 2014 peace pact between the government and the largest Muslim rebel group that ended 45 years of conflict.

In 2009, the Philippines imposed martial law on the southern Muslim-dominated province of Maguindanao after 58 people were murdered in political violence there.

(Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by clarence Fernandez)

Italy breaks up people-smuggling ring that imprisoned migrants

Migrants are seen aboard the British vessel HMS Enterprise before disembarking in the Sicilian

ROME (Reuters) – Italian police arrested seven people on Wednesday for running a people-smuggling ring in which Somali boat migrants who reached Italy by boat were held prisoner until their families paid their passage further north, a statement said.

A court in Catania in eastern Sicily ordered that 13 people be detained for running the smuggling operation, but only seven were picked up. The others were thought to be living abroad.

The investigation, dubbed “Somalia Express”, raided nine apartments in and around Catania used by the group to hold migrants in lieu of payment. Thirty-seven Somalis were freed from the apartments when the arrests were made, including three minors, the police statement said.

Families used pre-paid credit cards, or hawala, an informal payment system based on personal relationships, to pay off the smugglers, who would pick them up from migrant shelters in Sicily and neighboring Calabria, at the southern end of the Italian peninsula.

The money was then used to buy bus or train tickets for the migrants to send them to their final destination further north in Europe or within Italy, and for fake documents that allowed them to move freely, police said.

“These organized networks could continue to grow. We’re not optimistic,” Catania police chief Marcello Cardona told reporters after the arrests. Catania investigators broke up a similar group focused on Eritrean migrants in 2014.

As of May 10, 31,250 migrants had reached Italy by boat this year, a 14 percent decline from the same period last year, according to the Interior Ministry. This year, about 2,500 Somalis have reached Italy, compared with 12,176 last year.

Italy is one of the front-line countries in Europe’s worst migration crisis since World War Two. More than 320,000 came to Italy by boat in 2014-15, fleeing poverty and persecution at home and seeking a better life in Europe.

(Reporting by Steve Scherer; Editing by Mark Heinrich)