Cops hunt kidnappers after 6-year-old rescued

CASTRIES, St Lucia: Police were searching for two young men who allegedly kidnapped a six-year-old girl and then left her in a shallow hole in a forested area where she was rescued. Frederica Frederick was abducted from the Ave Maria Primary School during lunch Tuesday and driven to a remote area, about three miles away, police said. According to later accounts by the girl and two citizens who rescued her, the girl’s captors bound and gagged her, and placed her in a shallow hole.

Frederica told the local station Helen Television Systems that when two men came to take her away from her school, she protested. “But they pulled me away,” she said. The girl said the men, both of whom she knew, said her older brother owed them money. The plot began to unravel, according to two men who said they found the girl, when they were standing on a roadside in the wooded area and spotted her, wearing a school uniform, with her two abductors. Plummer said the two abductors then disappeared. The girl was freed just hours after being abducted. It was the first  kidnapping of its kind in St Lucia’s recent history.