Kidnap for ransom reached record levels last year, and has increased by 70% over the last eight years, according to a survey released by the Hiscox insurance group.

Little wonder, perhaps, when one looks at the size of the ransoms being extorted, and the relatively small number of kidnappers that ever get caught.

The price for releasing hostages ranges from huge cash payments, such as those allegedly paid to the Abu Sayyaf rebels in the Philippines, to the seemingly innocuous request for college education made by the West Side Boys in Sierra Leone.

“Kidnappers are getting more greedy, and more plucky in what they’re demanding,” said Bill Daley of Kroll Associates, a New York firm that specialises in negotiating hostage release around the world.

And very few kidnappers are ever brought to justice, according to Mr Daley.

“In many parts of the world, kidnapping incidents are not reported to the authorities – perhaps because of fear, mistrust or corruption. And so there is no investigation into the people involved,” Mr Daley told BBC News Online.

Kidnap danger zones

Most kidnapping takes place in countries where there is political upheaval, extreme poverty, or low levels of law enforcement.

In Colombia, the kidnap-capital of the world, an estimated 2,0000 people are kidnapped for ransom every year.

It has become Colombia’s second-biggest illegal industry, after drug-trafficking.

Kidnappings in former Soviet states – which have seen a breakdown of social order since the collapse of Communism – have also risen sharply, from five in 1992 to 105 last year.

“Kidnapping typically happens in countries where there’s a huge gap between the haves and have-nots,” said Mr Daley.

“Western business people are more of a target because they’re easily identifiable, and people know there’s money behind them,” he added.

In Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, gunmen frequently take oil workers hostage to protest against what they see as unfair exploitation by oil companies.

Tricky dealings

But in the murky world of hostage-taking, the demands of the kidnappers are often changeable or confused. And hard facts are difficult to obtain because of the delicate nature of negotiations.

The Abu Sayyaf hostage-takers were reported to have demanded the total independence for an independent Muslim state, and the release of convicted Afghan terrorists in the US.

But in reports denied by Libya, they eventually settled for $1m for each freed hostage in “development aid” from the Libyan leader’s Gaddafi Foundation.

And they lost no time in taking another hostage – this time a 24-year-old American they accused of being a CIA agent.

Deciding how to respond to kidnappings is a vexed question.

Many countries believe that to pay ransom is to encourage the kidnappers.

In the Philippines, for example, the money from the first batch of releases could help bankroll the group’s further activities.

In Italy there are laws against paying ransom, and similar laws were tried in Colombia.

But such measures are politically unpopular, especially among the relatives of current victims.

Experts say kidnappings in Colombia are unlikely to stop, as the rebels are reliant on ransom revenue to continue their struggle.

The raging battle between rival drug gangs also reached a gruesome new low as a murder victim in the northern city of Los Mochis had his face sliced off and stitched onto a football.

It was accompanied by a note which said: “Happy New Year, because it will be your last”. The torso and limbs of the victim, Hugo Hernandez, 36, had been cut into seven parts which were dumped separately along with his skull.

In another shocking case the remains of a 41-year-old former police officer were found hidden in two separate ice chests.

A total of 283 people are believed to have died in drug-related violence in Mexico in the first 10 days of this year, which is more than double the number during the same period in 2009.

In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, there were 102 killings in the first 10 days of the year, compared to 46 in that period last year. There were more than 2,500 victims in the city in the whole of 2009.

The explosion in violence comes three years after President Felipe Calderón declared war on the drug cartels.

He has since deployed 50,000 troops in a nationwide crackdown but has failed to stem the tide and 15,000 people have died since late 2006.

Last year was the bloodiest so far with more than 6,500 drug-related killings, according to the San Diego-based Trans-Border Institute which keeps death tallies.

Director David Shirk said: “It does appear that the violence has grown exponentially.”

However, the government has had recent successes against seven of the eight major drug cartels.

The most high profile was the killing of cartel boss Arturo Beltran Leyva in a firefight with the military south of Mexico City last month.

Another drug kingpin, Teodoro “El Teo” Garcia Simental, was arrested this week in a fishing city on the Baja California peninsula.

Garcia Simental, who operated in the border city of Tijuana, was one of Mexico’s most wanted drug lords who was notorious for beheading victims and allegedly having bodies dissolved in acid.

Last year one of his aides, Santiago Meza Lopez, 45, was captured and confessed to being his “soup master,” claiming to have dissolved 300 bodies in vats of chemicals.

The cartels are fighting for control of cocaine-smuggling routes from Central America into the US, the world’s top drug consumer, which has pledged millions of dollars in aid to help combat the cartels.

Mr Shirk said the powerful Sinaloa cartel headed by billionaire Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, which has so far been left relatively unscathed in the drug war, may now become dominant and that could ultimately lead to a fall in violence.

By Nick Allen in Los Angeles
Published: 6:47PM GMT 12 Jan 2010

SÃO PAULO, Brazil, June 23— A few years ago, the armored car business was one of Brazil’s fastest-growing industries. As urban crime and kidnappings soared, armored car dealers sprouted up by the dozens, and sales jumped almost sevenfold in five years.

But while violent crime continues to plague Brazil’s biggest cities, armored car sales have been declining for two years — partly because of a harsh economic slump and partly because most wealthy Brazilians who felt the need for bulletproof cars already own one.

So to keep their business humming, makers of the cars are turning to the export market — becoming the latest of many industries to look beyond Brazil’s borders for growth. And perhaps no region is more attractive as a market for armored cars than the Middle East — especially Iraq, where attacks on American troops and employees from Western companies have become common.

”On a daily basis, things are getting blown up and people are getting killed in Iraq, so it’s no wonder the demand for armored cars there is so big,” said Franco Giaffone, president of Abrablin, a trade association representing more than 30 Brazilian armored car manufacturers and dealers. Read More

Unfortunately for the Motor City, Kilpatrick, 38, is just one ripple in the area’s sea of crime. Detroit is the worst offender on our list of America’s most dangerous cities, thanks to a staggering rate of 1,220 violent crimes committed per 100,000 people.

“Detroit has, historically, been one of the more violent cities in the U.S.,” says Megan Wolfram, an analyst at iJet Intelligent Risk Systems, a Maryland-based risk-assessment firm. “They have a number of local crime syndicates there–a number of small gangs who tend to compete over territory.”
In Depth: America’s Most Dangerous Cities

Detroit was followed closely on the list by the greater Memphis, Tenn., and Miami, Fla., metropolitan areas. Those three were the only large cities in America with more than 950 violent crimes committed per 100,000 people.

Behind the Numbers
To determine our list, we used violent crime statistics from the FBI’s latest uniform crime report, issued in 2008. The violent crime category is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault. We evaluated U.S. metropolitan statistical areas–geographic entities defined by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget for use by federal agencies in collecting, tabulating and publishing federal statistics–with more than 500,000 residents.

Though nationwide crime was down 3.5% year over year in the first six months of 2008, the cities atop our list illustrate a disturbing trend: All 10 of the most dangerous cities were among those identified by the Department of Justice as transit points for Mexican drug cartels.

Run by crime lords like Joaquin Guzman Lorea, these gangs–and their violent turf wars–are spreading into the American Southwest and beyond. Places like Stockton, Calif., nearly 500 miles from Tijuana, have seen an uptick in related violent crime.

“Stockton is a major transit point along the I-5 corridor on the way to Seattle and Vancouver,” says Wolfram. “A lot of it is similar to crime happening in the Southwest. For the most part, it’s drug gang on drug gang.”
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Motown Blues
The situation in Mexico has escalated in recent years, but Detroit has been dealing with the same problems for decades. An industrial boomtown during the first half of the 20th century, the population of Detroit proper swelled from 285,000 in 1900 to 990,000 in 1920, reaching a peak of 1.8 million in 1950.

Only half that number still lives within city limits. Starting in the 1960s, Detroit began a precipitous decline. Most scholars blame rapid suburbanization, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and federal programs they say exacerbated the situation by creating a culture of joblessness and dependency. Residents fled to the suburbs and to other regions of the country entirely, leaving behind a landscape littered with abandoned buildings.

“Factories that once provided tens of thousands of jobs now stand as hollow shells, windows broken, mute testimony to a lost industrial past,” wrote Thomas J. Sugrue in his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis. “Whole sections of the city are eerily apocalyptic.”

Detroit isn’t the only city on the list that’s suffering from abandonment issues.

In Las Vegas, Nev., for example, the housing boom created loads of excess inventory. When the market tanked, homeowners suddenly found themselves with properties worth far less than the mortgages they’d taken out. In the worst cases, banks foreclosed, leaving people without homes–and with more debt than they’d had to begin with. As a result, Sin City is even emptier than Detroit.

“Detroit has trouble showing improvement in its crime rate because dedicated, desperately needed and appropriate resources are not invested in public safety. Painfully, it is not a priority,” says Wayne County Prosecuting Attorney Kym L. Worthy. “I wish that those with the resources would view domestic terrorism like they do terrorism across the water. It used to be that we were keeping our head above water and treading quickly. Now we are drowning, and no one seems to really care. All they tell me to do is cut some more.”

Few Signs of Improvement
Making matters more difficult, as municipal budgets shrink during this recession, crime-fighting funds are often among the first casualties.

“There’s less public spending during downturns,” says Wolfram. “Police departments and incarcerations systems are tough to fund.”

The news has been bad for decades, but there may yet be hope for Detroit. The city’s new mayor, Kenneth V. Cockrel Jr., assumed office on Sept. 19, 2008–and hasn’t committed a single felony.

CREDITS TO:

Zack O’Malley Greenburg
Forbes.com

When a client chooses HPC to armor their cars, a company representative will go to their site to evaluate the local conditions, where the armoring process will take place, and draw up the contract. After the contract is signed and payment is received, HPC will prepare the armoring kits and send them to the work site. When the kits arrive (in approximately fifteen days) the team of HPC employees will arrive to begin the armoring process. Delivery of final product is approximately forty-five days, for every five cars.

“The “Armor your car without leaving home” Program has many advantages:
1. You can follow your car’s armoring process and verify its quality.
2. You don’t need to import an armored car.
3. You get your car quicker.
4. You don’t need to worry about documentation and importing issues.
5. Your car will be getting the same quality as if it were done in our factory.

HPC is a pioneer in this type of service and is prepared to assist clients anywhere in the world, and if you happen to live on the moon, we’ll go there too.

According to Pedro Paulo Martins, the president of HPC Glass, exports take up 80% of production. The two biggest differences in glass production is for all the different levels of ballistic resistance, including level six, which protects against heavy weapons like M16, AK 47, and M80.

Armored glass from HPC has a polycarbonate material as its main component, which is tens of times more resistant that acrylic, and doesn’t cause distortions. In a modern industrial park, 9,000 meters squared, located in Itaquaquecetuba, in the Greater Sao Paulo, the company operates seven ovens and two autoclaves, developing matrices for armored glass with the same curvature as original auto glass, preventing the loss of the glass’s
silkscreen.