Mother, partner and grandfather jailed for kidnapping of two underage sisters
Three people have been arrested for abducting two girls aged 12 and 16 from a protected facility in Abruzzo and hiding them for sixteen days in an apartment in Formia.
Mother, partner and grandfather jailed for kidnapping of two underage sisters
Three people have been arrested on charges of kidnapping two girls aged 12 and 16 from a protected facility in Abruzzo and holding them hidden for over two weeks in an apartment in Lower Lazio. The mother of the victims, her current partner and her father have been taken into custody.
The two sisters had been removed from the "Hope" children's home in Civitella Alfedena, in the province of L'Aquila, on the night of 6 and 7 June. They disappeared from there without a trace, triggering a manhunt that concluded on 22 June with their discovery in Formia.
The carabinieri raid took place in the late afternoon on Sunday in a public housing block on the southern outskirts of the Lazio city. The girls were locked in a room with the shutters closed, staying with an eighty-year-old relative of the mother's whom she had not seen for over a decade. When the uniformed officers entered, the adolescents were watching television.
The investigative breakthrough came thanks to a video call intercepted that same morning between the detained woman and her daughters. After the call ended, the mother had told others that the girls "were dead". That lie convinced investigators that the minors were still alive and located in that property.
The magistrate in charge of the investigation, Sulmona prosecutor Luciano D'Angelo, recounted that at the time of their rescue the two appeared to be in good physical condition, but were visibly frightened. They were not cooperative with the military personnel and reportedly asked to be able to remain with their mother. The prosecutor explained that this behaviour is the result of prolonged conditioning carried out by the mother, defined in a previous ruling by the Cassino Court as a "manipulator".
The abduction plan proved to be fairly elaborate. The girls had left the facility through a glass door with a broken lock, had walked several hundred metres on foot and then got into a car where they were met by their paternal grandfather and their mother's partner. The approximately three-hour journey had transferred them from Abruzzo to southern Lazio.
To make tracing them difficult, the group had procured ten telephone cards purchased illegally in Naples. One had been given to the mother, another to one of the daughters who hid the phone inside a box of Christmas sweets. The investigators nonetheless managed to intercept communications quickly.
The custodial order mentions "numerous obstructive activities" and emphasises the risk that the three arrested individuals could flee or continue to obstruct the investigation. The charges are unlawful detention aggravated by the victims' minor status and vulnerability, which carries sentences of up to thirteen years' imprisonment.
The investigation is not closed: investigators are combing through the wider family network, resident between Minturno, Formia and Gaeta, to verify the presence of other accomplices. Seven of the ten purchased cards remain untraced.
Source: la Repubblica
Source: la Repubblica