27 May, 2020 @ 14:53
1 min read

Five people who faked kidnapping of COVID-19 victim in Spain’s Alicante arrested

Fake Kidnap Screenshot

A GANG of bogus kidnappers have been arrested after it emerged that the man they had allegedly grabbed was actually in hospital.

Police have revealed that the victim had gone to casualty in Alicante Hospital with injuries at the end of April and was found to have had contracted COVID-19.

When the gang heard he was in isolation without a phone they took advantage of him not being able to contact relatives, or his parents, to claim they had kidnapped him.

Fake Kidnap Screenshot
GRAINY: ‘Kidnappers’ sent intimidating videos to try and force relatives of patient to hand over cash.

They demanded €1,500 in cash to free him unharmed – even though he was tucked up in a hospital bed all along.

To make their demands more realistic, they shot videos wielding large knives. 

Grainy images of a young man being threatened were in reality one of the ‘kidnappers’ posing.

But instead of handing over cash, one of his relatives went to police in Torrelavega (Cantabria) to report an abduction.

An investigation quickly found the man was actually in hospital. 

Analysis of messages sent to the man’s family led officers to three men, one woman and a teenage boy, all Spanish, based in Alicante.

Dilip Kuner

Dilip Kuner is a NCTJ-trained journalist whose first job was on the Folkestone Herald as a trainee in 1988.
He worked up the ladder to be chief reporter and sub editor on the Hastings Observer and later news editor on the Bridlington Free Press.
At the time of the first Gulf War he started working for the Sunday Mirror, covering news stories as diverse as Mick Jagger’s wedding to Jerry Hall (a scoop gleaned at the bar at Heathrow Airport) to massive rent rises at the ‘feudal village’ of Princess Diana’s childhood home of Althorp Park.
In 1994 he decided to move to Spain with his girlfriend (now wife) and brought up three children here.
He initially worked in restaurants with his father, before rejoining the media world in 2013, working in the local press before becoming a copywriter for international firms including Accenture, as well as within a well-known local marketing agency.
He joined the Olive Press as a self-employed journalist during the pandemic lock-down, becoming news editor a few months later.
Since then he has overseen the news desk and production of all six print editions of the Olive Press and had stories published in UK national newspapers and appeared on Sky News.

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