Everybody’s got a price. Meet the man who sets it – a former negotiator in the kidnap-for-ransom industry. Yes, it’s an industry.
The worst regions for kidnapping may not be the ones you’d expect. Somali piracy has declined significantly after its peak around 2010, as the world’s navies have become more invested in protecting vital shipping routes through the Red Sea. Now, the Gulf of Guinea eclipses Somalia for piracy threat. Unlike the Red Sea, most shipping is regional intra-African freight, so powerful western navies haven’t intervened to quell the piracy threat as they did in Somalia. Sub-Saharan Africa also leads the world for land piracy, too, alongside Mexico, and to a lesser extent parts of the Philippines, Latin America and the Middle East.
There is a huge global market for K&R, the oddly bloodless term used industry-wide for ‘kidnap for ransom’, estimated in 2023 to be around £1.19bn, and mostly funded by ‘special risk’ insurance policies. I was the person who set the prices, and in almost all cases that crossed my desk, settlements and safe releases were reached. Ransoms varied hugely: the lowest I saw was just £20 for a bus full of Nigerians held hostage. The highest was £870,000 – each – for two American girls kidnapped elsewhere in Africa. In my time, inflation (yes, kidnappers really do factor this in) has pushed up the average ransom from £205,000 to £292,000. And as 97% of victims are local nationals, the ransom for itinerant foreign nationals often exceeds this figure considerably.
‘Kidnap group’ is a catch-all term. At their most professional, groups can be highly organised and capable criminal actors whose sole modus operandi is K&R. At the other end of the spectrum, kidnappers can be petty criminals looking to make a quick buck. In the middle, you get criminal actors who will pick K&R if the market suits them at that point in time. When prices are higher, kidnap groups will often siphon oil (as is the case with militant groups in the Niger delta), or turn to fishing (coastal villagers in Somalia) as an alternative source of revenue. As such, kidnap rates and ransom payments increase when fish stocks are low or oil prices dip.
When I worked in this industry, I found myself in a nondescript office in the City of London at four in the morning, watching YouTube clips of Escape to the Country blown up over our operations screens. Sometimes, as I’d watch a retired couple from Skelmersdale hunt for their dream cottage in the Tamar Valley, the bucolic imagery on-screen would be interrupted; this was the dreaded ring of the response line.
On the line, the calm voice of a security coordinator would describe how they’d received a call from their client saying that they’d been kidnapped. It was my job to record as much detail as possible on the victim, the location and the kidnappers. I had four hours to compile my initial analysis, looking at everything from where the possible kidnapper’s camp was, to what weapons the kidnappers possessed, and any historical cases I could identify to build a picture.
Finally, I had to ‘price up’ the victim. Myriad factors went into this process. The flowchart on the opposite page gives a rough guide as to how prices would vary. I used our company database of cases to set a ‘market price’ and a ‘starting price’ for the victim, just as an auctioneer would for vintage cutlery.
Next, the case would be passed on to the consultants. This group comprised former special forces personnel, trained in kidnap negotiations. Their tone of voice when you got a date wrong was enough to send shivers down your spine; you can only imagine how formidable they were when they had to negotiate a ransom. London-based consultants would coordinate ‘in-field’ responders, dispatching them across the globe to either liaise with local law enforcement or, when corruption was rife, to make contact and extract the victim themselves. In the early days of the company, cash ransoms were dropped by helicopter to pirates off the Somali coast who had taken a ship’s crew hostage. Recently, payments are increasingly being made via cryptocurrency or land-based cash exchanges.
A phrase that will never leave me during negotiations used by our company was ‘we don’t pay for damaged goods’; a clear message to the kidnappers that poor treatment of the victim reduced their price. Usually, they adhered to it.
K&R is a business, and kidnappers are in it for just that – it is not in their interest to do harm to the victim. Thisis an established and normalised trade of goods and services, the only difference being we dealt in human lives.
