A cryptocurrency investor has been charged with kidnapping an Italian man for weeks, threatening and torturing him with a gun and a chainsaw, in a grisly bid to extort his bitcoin password, court documents and US media said.
In a plot like a bad Hollywood thriller, New York police on Sunday said that they arrested 37-year-old John Woeltz, a Kentucky man, on Friday last week in the Manhattan apartment he was renting.
Woeltz was charged on Saturday with kidnapping, assault and criminal possession of a gun, and pleaded not guilty, according to court documents.
Photo: AP
A second person, 24-year-old Beatrice Folchi, is also being held.
The police said the victim, a 28-year-old Italian whose name has not been released, managed to escape and ran up to a traffic agent with a horrific tale of having been held, bound and tortured for weeks before managing to escape from Woeltz’s townhouse.
The victim initially went to Woeltz’s apartment on May 6. The two are believed to have had some previous business connection.
Upon arrival, Woeltz and an unidentified accomplice, who has yet to be named or caught, seized the Italian’s passport and electronic devices, and demanded the access codes for his bitcoin accounts.
When he refused, the two men tied him up, struck him with a gun, pointed it at his face, menaced him with a chainsaw and even took him to the fifth floor of the building, threatening to throw him over the edge if he did not relent, documents said.
They also reportedly threatened to kill members of his family.
Several details of the story remain murky, including exactly why the victim had agreed to come to the townhouse in an upscale neighborhood and whether he revealed anything of use to the kidnappers.
More details are expected to come out at a court hearing scheduled for tomorrow.
The grisly tale emerged as the bitcoin cryptocurrency this week set a new record of US$109,856.
While cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum are said to be highly secure, they have faced numerous cyberattacks seeking to exploit weak spots in exchange platforms. The FBI in February said that North Korean hackers stole a historic US$1.5 billion from the bybit platform.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS