A ransom for a five-year-old British boy kidnapped during a family holiday in Pakistan and freed this week was paid in Paris, Spanish police said on Wednesday, as five people were detained.
A Pakistani man and a Romanian woman who traveled to the French capital to collect a ransom of £110,000 (US$168,000) from the boy’s uncle were arrested on Tuesday in the town of Constanti in northeastern Spain, they said.
Another Pakistani man was also arrested in Constanti while French police detained two family members of the man who went to Paris for being accomplices. They had put up the couple at their apartment in the French capital.
The authorities made the arrests once they were informed that Sahil Saeed had been released in Pakistan and was safe, the head of Spanish police’s economic and violent crime unit, commander Serafin Castro.
“For obvious reasons we could not proceed before but the suspects were being monitored the entire time,” he told a news conference in Madrid.
The couple arrested in Spain told the boy’s uncle by cell phone to come to France from Britain and lay a backpack containing the ransom money on a sidewalk in the center of Paris and then promptly picked it up, he said.
They then drove to their apartment in Constanti where the third suspect arrested in Spain helped them remove the ransom money from their car.
Police found nearly £104,000 and more than 3,000 euros (US4,100) in the apartment as well as several cell telephones, including one which was used to make calls to the boy’s uncle in Paris, and a new computer.
The couple who traveled to Paris to collect the ransom money had been charged with murder and were on provisional release while they awaited their trial at the time of their arrest.
They had “knowledge of certain police practices” because they had worked for Spanish police before being arrested for murder, said Castro without providing further details.
Police in Pakistan said the kidnappers had dropped off Saeed in a field on Tuesday, allowing officers to recover him, but no arrests were made.
He was taken from his grandmother’s house in the town of Jhelum in the early hours of March 4 while preparing to leave to fly back to Britain.
Castro said four men armed with grenades and Kalashnikov assault rifles stormed the house and tied up all the family members as well as the driver of a taxi which had just arrived to make the trip to the airport before leaving with the boy.
They beat up Saeed’s father and threw a two-year-old boy in the house at the time against a wall during their assualt, he added.
The four men also stole jewels, cash, mobile phones and other valuables from the house before leaving in the taxi which they later abandoned.
Saeed’s mother Akila Naqqash said on Tuesday that she had spoken to her son by telephone from her home near Manchester, after his release and he could expect a “big party” when he arrives back from Pakistan.
“I need to see him with my own eyes to believe it. When he comes back I am going to give him a big kiss and cuddles and keep him happy,” she told the Manchester Evening News city newspaper.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver