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The Psychology of Kidnapping and Abduction

Overview of various types of kidnapping and the motives behind them, with advice from two former FBI agents about what to do if you or a loved one is taken hostage.

This article was updated by a new author on September 9, 2022.

The 1997 kidnapping and murder of Miguel Ángel Blanco, a 29-year-old councillor in a small Basque town, signaled the beginning of the end of a decades-long terror campaign in Spain. The kidnappers were members of a Basque separatist group called ETA that had, since their inception in 1959, sought to further their political agenda through violence. Bombings and assassinations often targeted high-profile politicians and security officers, such as a 1973 car bomb that killed Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, but some bombing attacks also targeted civilians.

Like many terror groups, ETA financed their activities in part with crimes like extortion, drug trafficking, armed robbery, and kidnapping for ransom. But kidnappings also served a political purpose: abductee-dissenters could be intimidated into silence, and high-profile hostages could be used as bargaining chips. In 1970, etarras (ETA members) abducted a German diplomat and used him to negotiate for amnesty for ETA defendants on trial in Burgos; he was released unharmed. And Miguel Ángel Blanco’s kidnappers hoped to negotiate for ETA prisoners held elsewhere in Spain to be moved to Basque jails. His abduction ended with two bullets to the back of his head.

The kidnapping of Miguel Ángel Blanco differed from other ETA attacks in one key way: it unified Spain against ETA. After decades of fear and anguish, millions of protestors took to the streets in what Eduardo Madina, a Spanish socialist politician who lost a leg in a 2002 ETA car bombing, refers to as a “collective awakening.” A 1998 truce and 1999 negotiations with the Spanish government seemingly marked the end of violence, before the peace ended with bombs in Madrid in 2000. Finally, after on-and-off ceasefires and peace talks, ETA officially disbanded in 2018. They had murdered 829 people between 1968 and 2010 and kidnapped 86, collecting estimated ransoms of 38.5 million euros

Madrid protest against ETA after a 2000 assassination {photo: César Astudillo}

While ETA may no longer pose a kidnapping or terror threat, for nearly half a century, Northern Spain was a hotspot for ideological violence, including politicized abductions. “There was a subculture of violence that led part of my generation to find it acceptable,” Madina told France24. “It was like living in a nightmare.”   

Such subcultures of violence, political and otherwise, have engulfed many societies, from skyrocketing murder and kidnapping rates in Mexico and Central America to abductions in North and West Africa and the Middle East by extremist groups like Boko Haram, Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. And whether the violence stems from narco-trafficking or Islamist insurrection, innocent citizens are caught in the crossfire, or even targeted.  

Below, I’ll touch on some global hotspots prone to various styles of kidnapping and the motives behind them.

Pro-ETA mural in Arrankudiaga, Vizcaya {photo: Zarateman}

Terrorism

In April 2014, the Islamic terror group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 female students from a boarding school in Chibok, northeastern Nigeria. The crime drew international outrage, united behind the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, but Boko Haram’s brutal attacks on schools continued. UNICEF reported in 2018 that Boko Haram militants had abducted more than a thousand students, murdered more than 2,200 teachers, and destroyed 1,400 schools in northeastern Nigeria over a five-year period. The motive, according to Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau: “Western education should end.” 

According to a 2021 article in Foreign Policy, what began as terrorism also proved useful as a way to finance and publicize Boko Haram’s operations and put “federal and state governments under pressure to secure the release of the victims at any cost.” Although officials in Nigeria have tried to keep negotiations under wraps, the poorly-kept secret of a $3.7 million ransom paid to free some of the abducted Chibok schoolgirls was seemingly enough to induce militants and allied bandits to escalate their abduction campaigns.

Families of some of the Chibok victims {public domain}

Once governments start paying large sums for kidnappings, the ransom demands rise. As Rukmini Callimachi noted in 2014 for The New York Times, Al Qaeda militants have made a lucrative business of abducting European citizens for ransom and netting ever-higher payments. “While in 2003 the kidnappers [Al Qaeda] received around $200,000 per hostage, now they are netting up to $10 million.” European governments, she adds, often deny paying ransom and/or disguise the payments as development aid. And in a vicious cycle, the ransom money underwrites recruitment and weapons purchases and incentivizes more abductions.

“Kidnapping hostages is an easy spoil,” wrote Nasser al-Wuhayshi, formerly the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, “which I may describe as a profitable trade and a precious treasure.” An added (and horrific) “profit” for groups like Islamic State and Boko Haram is inducing recruits with the promise of abducted girls as forced wives or sex slaves.

Some countries, like the U.S., have policies preventing ransom payments to terrorist groups, noting that paying ransom encourages more abductions. But as Christopher Mellon, Peter Bergen, and David Sterman wrote for a 2017 New America study, “countries that do not make concessions experience far worse outcomes for their kidnapped citizens than countries that do.” The study found that citizens of European nations that pay ransoms are more likely to be freed by their captors than abductees from the U.S. and Britain, which have strict no-concessions policies.

“If any terrorist group kidnapped valuable Americans and said ‘release one of the bombers that you have in custody in the United States,’ that would never happen.” —Manny Suarez, former Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit

Some countries with stated no-concessions policies do allow exceptions, says Manny Suarez, a former Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit: “There are some countries that have a humanitarian rule.” With the U.S. specifically, Suarez explains that “we have always had dialogue with terrorists.” But “as a country, we will never concede to a substantive demand. For example, if any terrorist group kidnapped valuable Americans and said ‘release one of the bombers that you have in custody in the United States,’ that would never happen.”

Zorka Martinovich, another former Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, points out that criminal and terrorist organizations aren’t always aware of these distinctions and may make demands that governments cannot meet. “We expect the hostage takers to understand the policy of every different country when they have multinational kidnaps.” But she adds that “people tend to equate no concession with no negotiation or no dialogue, and that’s not accurate.” Just because the U.S. has a no-concession policy, that doesn’t mean the government won’t advise families and help with negotiations during a terrorist kidnapping.

High (and Low) Ransom

Some terrorist abductions are motivated by the lure of ransom. But other kinds of criminal organizations also target people with the intent of gaining a high ransom. These victims are often profiled extensively beforehand, and the crime is planned. The kidnappers may target children of wealthy parents or members of certain organizations under the assumption that friends or relations of the kidnapping victim can raise a significant amount of money for the victim’s release. 

As we’ve seen, Nigeria is especially prone to this form of kidnapping, with approximately 18 million U.S. dollars paid as ransom between 2011 and 2020. High ransom kidnapping is also common in other countries in the Middle East and Africa, such as Mali, South Africa, and Iraq. And there’s also a surge in lower-ransom mass kidnappings in Mexico, Central America, and Haiti, where criminal gangs that traffic weapons and drugs have turned to extortion and kidnappings as additional sources of revenue. In Mexico, abduction gangs have shifted tactics: in the 1990s, they focused on wealthy Mexican businessmen and politicians and demanded high ransoms. In recent years they’ve begun targeting ordinary middle- and working-class people, and even destitute migrants, whose families are then extorted for ransom by phone. The ransoms are lower, but so is the risk. It’s a tragic trend some experts have termed the “democratization of kidnapping.”

“The reality is negotiating with the hostage takers and generally paying some sort of private ransom is the best path to safe release.” —Zorka Martinovich, former Supervisory Special Agent of the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit

Suarez and Martinovich have straightforward advice for families whose loved ones have been abducted. After receiving a ransom call, people should “call the FBI, or in some cases they would call their senator,” Suarez says. “Senators know how to address this.”

Martinovich adds that ”going direct to the government embassy or the FBI domestically are two good paths to start.” These institutions know where to forward a call to get the right people working a kidnapping or hostage case. 

What happens after the call? Martinovich explains that once agents have information on an abduction case, “if it’s a straightforward kidnapping [non-terrorist], we’re working with local host countries,” she says. “If we have local partners that we can work with, certainly we do that, local resources, intelligence, anything else we can do. But, remarkably, the heroes of these stories are really the families. Because…the reality is negotiating with the hostage takers and generally paying some sort of private ransom is the best path to safe release.”

Express Kidnapping

While some kidnappers profile wealthy victims and seek high ransoms, others turn to express kidnapping. In express kidnappings, criminals or crime organizations snatch victims and force them to withdraw cash from ATMs. A common tactic is to pose as a taxi service, lure an unwitting victim into the vehicle, and threaten the trapped victim until he draws out cash. Paul Heller, a blogger and long-term traveler, writes that his express kidnapping started with getting in a “taxi that looked to be legitimate.” Heller had taken the same route “twice before in an Uber” and had even been “in hundreds if not thousands of taxis and Ubers in Mexico” without any safety issues, but this time was different. One ride in the wrong cab ended with “several bruises” and “nearly $1500 US” gone.

Express kidnappings don’t net millions of dollars per victim. They’re crimes of opportunity that target multiple, usually random victims. And because abductees are often middle or lower class and taken for a short period of time, these crimes don’t attract as much attention from authorities or the media. 

Express kidnappings are particularly common in Mexico, where the ransoms are usually used to fund drug smuggling operations or other organized crime. As the cartels have splintered and the number of offshoot criminal groups vying for territory has increased — 400 such groups  as of 2016 — express kidnappings have become one of the most common forms of kidnapping in Mexico. In 2016, 66% of Mexican kidnappings were express kidnappings. Other places in Latin America, like Colombia, also have high rates of express kidnapping.

Mexico City protest against cartel violence and government inaction, 2011 {photo: Zapata}

Virtual Kidnapping

This form of kidnapping doesn’t involve physically kidnapping a victim, but instead relies on phone call scams to convince people their loved ones have been captured and will be harmed or killed unless a ransom is paid. The scammer will sometimes play a recording of a scream or act out a voice, which often makes the victim accidentally call out someone’s name, giving the scammer more personal information to make their scheme believable. Virtual kidnappings happen quickly, since the scammers know there’s a short window of time before victims find out that their loved one isn’t actually in any danger. 

Virtual kidnappings can originate from anywhere and affect anyone, but many cases occurring in the United States come from Mexico. From 2013 to 2015, many of these scam calls came from Mexican prisons and targeted specific people. But in recent years, the scammers have started calling hundreds of people at a time until someone falls for the trick. These callers will use the ransom money obtained from the scheme to make their lives easier in jail or bribe their way out. 

Virtual kidnappings are extremely hard for law enforcement to trace, as the ransom money is often wired in small amounts out of the country. And because so much of our personal information is easy to find online, these scams are also difficult to prevent. According to a 2022 Rolling Stone article, scammers have even begun targeting high-profile entertainment industry people. Herman Weisberg, a private investigator, ex-NYPD officer, and managing director of SAGE Intelligence, says criminals are taking advantage of the very public information that’s available about celebrities’ families. “These people can just sit on their phone and watch from afar and figure out exactly somebody’s daily routine.” Weisberg told Rolling Stone. “And they’re just hoping that one person out of 100 takes the bait.”

Takeaways:

When we think of kidnapping and abduction, what comes to mind are high-profile victims like Memphis jogger Eliza Fletcher (2022) or Elizabeth Smart (2002). Child abductions are especially likely to make headlines and stoke our fears. But although hundreds of thousands of minors are reported missing every year, most are runaways or were taken by a non-custodial parent. According to Reuters, fewer than 350 juveniles under 21 are kidnapped every year by strangers. The good news is, most children reported missing — more than 99% — are found alive.

There’s no way to zero out the danger that we — or our families — will be victimized by kidnappers. But Suarez and Martinovich have advice on ways to mitigate risk. More than anything, says Suarez, “people need to be more aware.” If you’re traveling, “look a little more like the locals” and “don’t show wealth,” but even if you’re in your own town where you feel safe, there is always a more dangerous sector to avoid. 

“If you’re living or traveling to someplace risky, you should have an idea about what that risk is.” —Zorka Martinovich

“Every city on the planet has it,” Suarez says. “It’s just an awareness thing.”

Martinovich agrees: “I’m a huge advocate for prevention,” she says. “There are some common-sense things that people can do before they find themselves in a situation where they are a potential victim.” For instance, “if you’re living or traveling to someplace risky, you should have an idea about what that risk is. And so in that regard, the State Department website has countries designated [with] four categories to include ‘do not travel.’”

As for virtual kidnapping, minimizing your online presence can help. But for most of us, that’s just not realistic. At the very least, you can avoid posting details of your schedule and movements, especially when traveling.

If you are abducted, there are ways to increase your odds of survival. “You don’t want to be loud and boisterous and, you know, yelling expletives,” Suarez says. “You just want to be a non-threatening, compliant — yet aware — person of what’s going on.” Suarez clarifies that “if people get hurt, they’re going to be on one of the extremes. They’re going to be the loud, boisterous, entitled person that draws attention to themselves, or it’s going to be the other person who’s just broken down and is maybe even catatonic.”

Martinovich adds, “Make sure that you eat. Make sure that any time things are provided to you like food and sustenance, you take advantage. Because in order for your brain to function, to make good decisions, you need to have that energy. And if you’re thinking of an escape, you also need to maintain your own health.”

Before planning a trip, check travel advisories to determine the level of threat in a new place. Having a situational awareness of the types of kidnappings common in certain areas can be the difference between a safe trip and a nightmare. In your own neighborhood, understand the places to avoid and try not to travel there, especially at night or on your own. Governments have professionals in place to deal with kidnappings, but the best way to avoid a kidnapping starts with prevention and your own awareness. 


About the Author:

Sarah Datta is a writer from San Diego, CA.


Sources:

“‘We lost our fear’: the Basque terror group’s killing that made Spain say enough is enough,” by Sam Jones, The Guardian, July 9, 2022.

Bloody campaign and gradual demise of Basque group ETA,” by Reuters Staff, Reuters, April 6, 2017

ETA,” by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 May. 2018.

Facing terror charges, Basque separatist group ETA’s last boss apologizes for deaths,” by Aritz Parra and Angela Charlton, NPR, October 19, 2020

ETA disbanding brings formal end to decades of violence,” by News Wires, France 24, March 5, 2018.

Nigeria Chibok abductions: What we know,” BBC News, May 8, 2017.

Boko Haram Won’t Stop Targeting Schools in Nigeria,” by Philip Obaji Jr., Foreign Policy, March 23, 2021.

More than 1,000 children in northeastern Nigeria abducted by Boko Haram since 2013,” UNICEF press release, April 13, 2018.

Paying Ransoms, Europe Bankrolls Qaeda Terror,” by Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times, July 29, 2014.

Reducing the risk of kidnapping,” by The Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Travel. Smartraveller. August 6, 2021.

Prevention of Kidnappings and Hostage-Taking by Terrorists, by Alex P. Shmid, 2020.

8 Lessons from a Horrifying Express Kidnapping in Mexico,” by Paul Heller, Fifty Plus Nomad, March 9 2020.

Hundreds of people in Mexico are kidnapped every year. And the problem’s getting worse.” by Rory Smith, Vox, May 11, 2018. 

Virtual Kidnapping,” by The Federal Bureau of Investigation, October 16, 2017.

The business of kidnapping: inside the secret world of hostage negotiation,” by Joel Simon, The Guardian, January 25, 2019.

Who’s at risk of being kidnapped in Nigeria?” by Al Chukwuma Okoli, The Conversation, June 17, 2022. 

Kidnapping for ransom works like a market. How it is organized is surprising.” by Anja Shortland, The Washington Post, December 13, 2016. 

‘Virtual Kidnappings’ Hit Entertainment-Industry Elite,” by Tatiana Siegel, Rolling Stone, August 5, 2022.

How the FBI Responds to International Kidnappings,” by The Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 1, 2019.