Chloe Ayling: Who is the British model who was drugged and kidnapped in Italy?
Chloe Ayling, 20, is the glamour model who was drugged and abducted in Italy after reportedly being duped into attending a bogus photoshoot.
Italian police say she was snatched last month by at least two men who claim to be part of dark web group Black Death, who say they sell women as sex slaves online.
The kidnapping
Miss Ayling was snatched last month by a group calling itself Black Death and is believed to have been drugged and transported in a bag to an isolated village near Turin, where she was held for six days as her captors tried to auction her online.
She described how she was drugged, handcuffed, gagged and put in a bag in the boot of a car by kidnappers before being driven off to the farmhouse where she was held captive.
“A person wearing black gloves came from behind and put one hand on my neck and one on my mouth to stop me from screaming,” she said in her statement.
“A second person wearing a black balaclava gave me an injection in my right forearm. I think I lost consciousness. When I woke up I was wearing a pink bodysuit and the socks I am wearing now.
“I realised I was in the boot of a car with my wrists and ankles handcuffed, adhesive tape on my mouth. I was inside a bag and was only able to breathe through a small hole.”
As she screamed for help she was driven 120 miles to the tiny hamlet of Borgial near the French border where they forced her to lie on the floor next to a chest of drawers and handcuffed her hands and feet to the legs, leaving her " totally immobilised".
She was kept handcuffed to furniture in the village of Borgial but was freed after six days and taken to the British Consulate in Milan, despite the ransom not being paid, police said.
They had taken photographs of her whilst she was unconscious which were posted on the dark web with the view to auctioning her off.
Why was she released?
According to Ms Ayling, one of her kidnappers confessed to her that they had made a mistake seizing her because she was the mother of a young child.
He said it was against the “rules” of his organisation and his superiors were angry. Afterwards they removed the cuffs from her feet and allowed her to move around the farmhouse, she said.
The captors demanded £270,000 from her agent but eventually dropped agreed to accept £50,000 and Herba took her to the British Consulate in Milan on July 17 where he was arrested.
Her captor
Lukasz Pawel Herba is accused of being part of a Black Death gang which drugged and kidnapped Chloe Ayling, who had been lured to Milan on the promise of a fashion shoot.
Herba, 30, a Polish national who was living in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, told the 20-year-old glamour model as she was held prisoner in a remote farmhouse that unless her agent paid a ransom of $300,000, she would be sold as a sex slave in the Middle East.
His home in Oldbury, in the West Midlands, has been raided by British officers.
Under questioning by Italian police, he claimed he became part of the kidnapping gang because he was suffering from leukemia and desperately needed to raise half a million pounds for treatment.
He could provide no medical proof of having the illness.
He was arrested as he dropped the model off at the British Consulate in Milan on July 17.
Who are the Black Death group?
The Black Death group operates on the Dark Web and allegedly sells kidnapped women as sex slaves in online auctions.
The group was investigated in 2016 amid fears that they were selling a 15-year-old British girl in an online auction.
Europol had monitored the group's Dark Web site of as they advertised two teenagers for auction, one of whom was under the age of consent and described as "pure".
The auction of the 15-year-old, whose name was given as Laura, started at $750,000 and was due to take place at the end of May 2016, with the Black Death website warning that it was "fully booked".
A second auction for a 17-year-old girl born in the UK named only as Gemma had been scheduled to take place just days earlier with a starting bid of $120,000.
The age, hair colour and measurements of both teenagers were posted alongside their auction adverts.
It is unknown whether these auctions went ahead.
Questions over shoe shopping incident
The Italian media has raised questions over the kidnapping after it was revealed the model went shoe shopping with her captor.
Newspaper La Repubblica claimed Ms Ayling burst into tears when police investigators asked her about the trip.
The newspaper reported: "That the kidnapping was real or that she was doped with ketamine is not put into question by the investigators.
"But it is also tremendously true that many details do not add up.
"Starting with a question that the police investigators suddenly asked Chloe, causing her to cry, 'But don't you think it is strange to go and buy shoes with your kidnapper?
"Because that also happened and, of course, the shop assistant, identified by the cops, recognized her, and recognized the person she calls MD [Herba]."
Her lawyer has called people who raised these questions "evil", defending his client's shoe shopping trip.
He told Radio 4's Today programme: "She was told that she was going to be sold to somebody in the Middle East for sex.
"She was told that people were there watching her and ready to kill her if she tried anything.
"So she thought that the best idea was to go along with it and to be nice in a way to her captor because he told her that he wanted to release her somehow and sometime and she thought that the best thing to do was not to go in conflict with him.
"So she abided to his request, 'let's go and buy groceries' and 'you need shoes, let's go buy shoes' and she didn't try to flee.
"But I believe she was terrified at the moment and even if she could've asked for help she didn't because she was subjugated to this person, or people as she was given to understand."
She told police she had developed a trusting relationship and even shared a bed with her kidnapper, who gave her chocolate and underwear, but she said he had not sexually assaulted her.
