Friday 7 October 2022 11:25 AM Four friends 'who kidnapped British public schoolboy in Italy and tortured him' ... trends now
Four people are to go on trial accused of kidnapping a British former public schoolboy in Italy and holding him chained to a stepladder in a bizarre £6,000 ransom plot.
Sam Demilecamps, 26, was found by police last year in a darkened room after police traced his mobile phone to a dingy flat where he had been left over scraps for eight days.
Officers were alerted after he texted his family and told them he was being tortured and beaten by the group, who told he would not be free him unless he paid them off.
British detectives alerted counterparts in Italy and Mr Demilecamps was found in an apartment at Monte San Giusto near Ancona after they signal from his phone was traced.
Sam Demilecamps, now 26, said he was held captive for eight days in Monte San Giusto, central Italy, by a gang who, he claimed, beat and tortured him, and fed him 'leftovers like a dog'
Aurora Carpani, here 20, is one of the group of four arrested over the kidnapping of the Briton
The three men and a woman were quickly rounded up after the incident last October before being released under house arrest while charges of kidnapping and extortion were investigated.
At a preliminary hearing Mr Demilecamps, who was educated at a £36,000 a year Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, told the court he had been kidnapped 200 miles away in Florence while staying at a hostel.
He was bundled into a van and driven to Monte San Giusto, describing his kidnap he said: ‘My captors had seen me spending lavishly. They kicked and punched me, used a taser and pepper spray, then dragged me into a car and gave me tranquilisers.
‘They drove me to Monte San Giusto. I was held underwater in a bath and beaten.’
He added how he had sent texts to family and
