A British model endured a harrowing six-day ordeal after being kidnapped by would-be sex traffickers when she arrived in Milan for what was billed as a lucrative photoshoot.
Instead, the unidentified woman was attacked by three men who knocked her unconscious with a syringe full of horse tranquilizer when she arrived at the address, according to the New York Post.
The woman was stripped, put in the trunk of a car and taken to a remote farmhouse where she was held for six days cuffed to a dresser as her captors put her up for sale on the dark web. Their starting bid was $353,000 in the cyber-currency bitcoin, Italian authorities said.
“The psychological pressure on the girl has been extreme,” an Italian police investigator told London’s Telegraph newspaper. “She was very afraid.”
The woman was freed after nearly a week when her modeling agency negotiated a $60,000 ransom in cooperation with Italian police to bring the kidnappers out in the open. The would-be traffickers reportedly decided to accept a ransom instead of selling her as a sex slave when they were told the woman had a 2-year-old child.
One of the accused kidnappers, 30-year-old Lukasz Pawel Herba, was arrested and confessed to be part of a sex-trafficking ring dubbed the “Black Death Group.”
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