My safety bubble has burst Kidnap victim tells his story

Kidnap victim tells his story

- Steven Morris

As he lay on the floor of a remote Welsh cottage, battered by masked kidnappers and handcuffed to a radiator, musician and record producer Itay Kashti was heartbroken to imagine he would never see his family again. "I thought: 'This is it. I'm going to die and this is the end of my story.' I felt it was the final scene from a movie. I was thinking about my children."

He puzzled over why he was a victim. He is not a very wealthy man nor is he a high-profile figure. He wondered if it might be his roots in Israel. "I thought maybe I had been targeted for my background and somebody had decided to abduct an Israeli to make a point," he said. "But I really didn't know."

The details of Kashti's ordeal were laid bare at a sentencing hearing at Swansea crown court when his three attackers - Faiz Shah, 22, Mohammad Comrie, 22, and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20 - were imprisoned for eight years for kidnap.

Believing they could make a £1m ransom, the trio lured Kashti from his London base to the rented cottage in Carmarthenshire. They beat him, threatened to kill him and secured him to the pipe, but when they were gone Kashti managed to wriggle free and call for help.

Judge Catherine Richards, who sentenced the men, from West Yorkshire and south London, ruled they had twin motives. They had targeted an "innocent" and "hard-working" man for his perceived wealth but there may also have been a political angle for picking him because of his Jewish heritage.