A group of friends have been found guilty of kidnapping a former public schoolboy in an attempt to get his parents to hand over £6,000.
Sam Demilecamps, 26, texted his family in the UK from Italy last year saying he was being beaten and tortured and would not be released unless a ransom was paid.
He was found in an apartment in Monte San Giusto, near Ancona, after detectives managed to trace his phone’s signal.
Mr Demilecamps, who was educated at £36,000 a year Lord Wandsworth College in Hampshire, told a closed-door hearing in Florence that he was kidnapped 200 miles away from the flat while staying at the hostel.
“My captors had seen me spending lavishly,” he told the court. “They kicked and beat me, used a taser and pepper spray, then dragged me into a car and gave me sedatives.
‘They took me to Monte San Giusto. I was held underwater in a bath and beaten.’
Mr. Demilecamps was also said to have been handcuffed to a stepladder as part of the kidnapping attempt.
His parents, Patrick Demilcamps and Jalaleh McCall, alerted the police instead of paying the ransom and the gang was quickly arrested.
Doubt about the plot soon arose, but after it turned out that Mr. Demilcamps knew his captors well, he showed footage of him partying and diving with the group last summer.
But the group was charged last October in a preliminary hearing, where they opted for an expedited trial that lasted just a day yesterday.
Ahemd Rajraji, 22, was sentenced to eight years in prison; Rubens Beliga Gnaga, 19, and Dona Conte, 23, each received five years and two months; and Conte’s girlfriend Aurora Carpani, 21, was given three years and three months.
Michele Zuccaro, representing Mr Demilecamps, told Mail Online“I spoke to Sam and he is pleased that the judicial system has ruled in his favor and the gang has been convicted.
“He went through a very traumatic and shocking ordeal and is still suffering the consequences more than a year later.
“The evidence presented to the court consisted of the mobile phone message between the gang showing that they were planning and executing the kidnapping.
“Sam is relieved that the court believed him because the defense strategy was to suggest that this was all a plot contrived with his help, when it clearly wasn’t and he was an innocent victim all along.”
Instead of going to prison, the gang will first serve their sentence under house arrest until an automatic appeal is considered next year.
Vando Scheggia, Rajraji’s lawyer, told MailOnline on behalf of the group: ‘As we have always said, this was not a kidnapping plot and my client and the other accused all deny the charges against them.
“They all knew each other and we showed how they all knew each other. Mr. Demilecamps boasted how rich he was, but he didn’t really have much. He was in the flat of his own free will and was not tortured or beaten.
‘He had borrowed money from the four and they let him stay in the flat while he arranged to give them the money he owed them – that’s all, nothing more. This is not a mafia kidnapping, it’s very trivial.’
Demilecamps, who lives in Brighton, previously made headlines in 2016 after breaking his back jumping off a cliff in Taormina, Sicily, into the sea for a bet.
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