FOUR GERMAN pensioners aged between 61 and 80 were found guilty yesterday of taking their financial adviser hostage and holding him in a purpose-built prison in Bavaria after their share investments failed.
A court in Traunstein, Bavaria, found that two retired couples kidnapped James Amburn and tried to force him to refund €2.5 million in lost investments.
In June last year they took him from his home in western Germany and drove him 280 miles to the village of Chieming on the Austrian border, where he spent four days in a makeshift jail.
He was freed after he managed to insert a message to call police in a fax sent to his Swiss bank. The bank then raised the alarm with German police, who stormed the lakeside house where he was being held. The defendants argued they had invited Mr Amburn for a short holiday in upper Bavaria.
But the judge ruled it was a ‘‘spectacular case of vigilante justice’’ and said people could not take the law into their own hands.
The ringleader, a 74-year-old retired building contractor known only as Roland K, was jailed for six years after being found guilty of hostage-taking and grievous bodily harm.
Mr Amburn was kept prisoner in the home Roland K shared with his 80-year-old wife. His male accomplice, Willi D, received a five-year sentence for false imprisonment and grievous bodily harm.
The men’s wives were given suspended sentences of between 18 and 21 months.
Roland K and Willi D kidnapped US-born Mr Amburn at his house in Speyer, by the Rhine, and put him in a man-sized box. The court heard how the men carried the box to their car, ready to tell anyone who asked that they were lugging a marble statue.
The men tied Mr Amburn up in a purpose-built container, in which they transported him to the boot of Roland Ks car. Along the way, they beat him up, breaking two ribs when he tried to flee during a stop. The group then brought him to the garage for questioning, during which they served him coffee and cake, and forced him to sign documents in which he promised to pay back the lost investments.
Roland K told the court that the aim of the dungeon, which he referred to as an “emergency guest room”, had been to get Mr Amburn “to pull out his cheque book”. – (Guardian service)