Hamzah Ahmed, Clinton Prowell, and Cameron Wynne kidnapped a 14-year-old boy, stripped him naked, and tortured him with a stun gun for refusing to sell drugs for them in Hull, England.
The three men, aged 26, 21, and 18, snatched the boy from the street in 2019 after he had briefly committed to selling cannabis for them before backing out.
The trio physically beat their victim in the car as he was driven around Hull “at speed” and a fourth, unnamed man used a stun gun on him, according to a HullLive court report.
“The victim was told he would be taken to a forest and be thrown into a river. Prowell told him he was going to ‘poke him up’ to which the victim thought that he was going to be stabbed,” recalled the prosecutor, Ian Cook.
He was eventually taken to a park where he was further beaten and subjected to stun gun blasts and ordered “to strip naked”, but eventually allowed to run away — still naked — with the threat that his mother and newborn sister would be stabbed if he turned to the authorities for help.
In a victim impact statement, the boy described “feeling constantly paranoid that somebody is going to come and get him. He is constantly looking over his shoulder.”
He also “now suffers from depression” and has “attempted to take his own life on three occasions because he couldn’t cope with the worry and stress he was feeling.”
“He thought the defendants were going to kill him and he cannot get the fear out of his head,” the prosecutor explained.
Ahmed, Prowell, and Wynne all plead guilty to kidnapping and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and are due to be sentenced on February 10th.
All are convicted criminals, with Ahmed having four convictions, including for dealing Class A drugs, and Wynne a conviction for carrying a knuckleduster.
Prowell already has “five convictions for eleven offences on his record including assaulting a police constable and a robbery where he threatened his victim with a brick”, according to HullLive.
Bizarrely, he wrote an apology letter to his latest victim for the court in which he says he “cannot imagine what [the victim] and his mum went through” — although as the person who put them through it he does of course have fairly direct knowledge of the ordeal.
None of the three have ever received meaningful terms in custody for their crimes previously.
Drug gangs exploiting children to do their dirty work is a growing problem in Britain, with one Zakaria Mohammed becoming the first drug dealer convicted under the Modern Slavery Act for using youngsters as “expendable workhorses” in so-called ‘county lines’ crime in 2018.
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