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A group of well-to-do German senior citizens, who lost their savings in the credit crunch, staged a revenge attack and held their terrified financial advisor to ransom, according to several published reports Wednesday.
The alleged kidnapping is the latest example of what is being dubbed “silver crime” — the violent backlash of pensioners who feel cheated by the world, the Daily Telegraph said.
“As I was letting myself into my front door I was assaulted from behind and hit hard,” the financial adviser James Amburn, a 56-year-old German-American, told the Telegraph. “Then they bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. I thought I was a dead man.”
He was freed by 40 armed policemen from the counter-terrorist unit last Saturday, after he pretended to send a fax to a Swiss bank asking for the transfer of funds demanded by the pensioners, writing "call.pol-ice" in German.
According to the Telegraph, two couples who entrusted Amburn's investment company with $2.2 million bundled him into an Audi in the west German town of Speyer and drove him to one of their holiday homes near the Austrian border.
Amburn claimed he was held there in a cellar for four days while being fed soup twice a day and beaten.
“I was beaten. They threatened again and again to kill me,” Mr Amburn told the newspaper.
The pensioners are under arrest on suspicion of deprivation of liberty, torture and inflicting grievous bodily harm. These charges carry a maximum of 15 years in prison, said the Telegraph.
Figures for the amount of violent backlashes of pensioners who feel cheated during the financial crisis have increased, according to the newspaper.
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