Kidnappers Prosper in Iraq

[dArKeR]

Families Pay Ransom Rather Than Seek Police Help.
When the kidnappers told Dina Karim, 17, to come out of the dark room where they had kept her for five days, all she could think about was whether they would kill her with a gun or with a knife.


But they did not kill her. Instead, they took her blindfolded on a half-hour drive and dumped her in a Baghdad neighborhood, where she found a store owner and asked to call home so her mother could pick her up.

When her mother, Tissam Karim, a schoolteacher, arrived, Dina burst into tears. She wept partly from relief and partly from the memory of a 5-year-old boy she left behind, a child who was in the kidnappers' lair when she arrived and, for all she knows, is still there. "He cried all the time. I still think of him. He was so scared," Dina said.

Kidnapping has become so common in Baghdad that it is hard to go to any neighborhood in the city without hearing about someone who knows someone who was a victim. In some places, residents know of multiple cases. When Tissam Karim was trying to figure out whether and how to pay a ransom for her daughter, she sought advice from a family in her neighborhood that had gone through a similar experience.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10369-2003Sep14.html

[The_Casual_Observer]

1. Somebody better send this one to Cheney

"Kidnapping has become so common in Baghdad that it is hard to go to any neighborhood in the city without hearing about someone who knows someone who was a victim."


I don't think he is aware of this.

[IthinkThereforeIAM]

2. I wonder...

...if the number of missing or "lost by the state of Florida CPS" children has decreased.