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evening sitdown
Your evening longread: Inside the world of hostage negotiation
It’s a coronavirus-free zone as we bring you an interesting longread each evening to take your mind off the news.
EVERY WEEK, WE bring you a round-up of the best longreads of the past seven days in Sitdown Sunday.
And now, every weeknight, we bring you an evening longread to enjoy which will help you to escape the news cycle.
We’ll be keeping an eye on new longreads and digging back into the archives for some classics.
A look at the business of kidnapping, and how the official policy in the UK and the US is never to make concessions to kidnappers. As this sometimes has fatal results, is it time to rethink the policy?
(The Guardian, approx 19 mins reading time)
In April 1986, Jennifer Guinness, the wife of banker and member of the Guinness brewing family John Guinness, was kidnapped by a gang that demanded a ransom of £2m. She was rescued in a police raid only eight days after being abducted. But the fact that a K&R policy had been triggered and Control Risks were brought in to negotiate a possible ransom sparked outrage. “Private security firms such as the ones called in on the Guinness kidnapping are operating at the very frontiers of official tolerance,” a top police official announced.
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