A group of Albanians are accused of kidnapping and torturing a man in an attempt to extract a £400,000 (~$452,000) ransom from his family overseas.
The 30-year-old victim, himself an Albanian and so far unnamed by the authorities, is said to have been held for four days at a location in the east of Britain’s multicultural capital and subjected to terrible abuse.
Local media reports that it was the Albanian authorities who first learned of the kidnap from the victim’s brother, and they went on to alert the British authorities in order to coordinate a response.
“Albanian police successfully finalised an international operation to free a man who was kidnapped,” said Gent Mullai, a spokesman for the Albanian State Police, in comments to the press.
“The investigation directorate of crimes at Albanian police received information about a 30-year-old Albanian who was kidnapped in England and had been asked for £400,000 to free him. Albanian State Police exchanged information with the UK who then set up an operation to free him,” Mullai explained.
“That operation identified and freed the kidnapped man who is now safe under UK police protection. Seven people all Albanian so far have been arrested,” he added, claiming that he could not “name the kidnapped person or the arrested people until the end of this operation.”
Migrants from Albania, a Muslim-majority country in the Balkans, have accounted for the largest single group of foreign nationals in British prisons since 2020, with the problem becoming so acute that the British government has tried to strike deals with the Albanian government for them to be transferred to prisons in their homeland.
Albanians also account for an increasingly large number of the illegal boat migrants crossing the English Channel, with their numbers up a hundredfold on last year to up to 60 per cent of the total influx.
The British authorities have been doing a poor job of deporting such migrants, which include previously deported violent criminals, in part because they are able to game the system by claiming asylum — a system which Britain’s governing Conservatives (Tories) are yet to change, despite years of tough talk on illegal immigration.
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