The final, haunting memory is a group photograph of the girls – clad in grey and black – taken in scrubland and posted online by the kidnappers as proof of their mass abduction.
The kidnapping took twenty days and resulted in the payment of 35 million guilders (aprox. 15.8 million euros) paid to four kidnappers: Cor van Hout, Willem Holleeder, Frans Meijer, Jan Boellaard and Martin Erkamps.
Weinstein suffered from heart problems, high blood pressure and asthma, and after his abduction, his employer, the developer JE & Austin Associates, implored his kidnappers to get him medications.
The only non-Algerians who braved the country were hardened war reporters such as Robert Fisk, who described disguising his European face with a newspaper when travelling by car in Algiers and staying no more than four minutes in a street or a shop – the minimum time, he decided, for kidnappers to spot a European.
Sophisticated kidnappers will target people they know are insured.
Rewarding kidnappers will encourage more kidnappings of Americans, many said.
It is also, despite great recent improvements in its policing, one of the most criminal states: plagued by kidnappers, as well as an insurgency that to some degree affects 23 of its 38 districts.Yet the Maoists are much stronger elsewhere.
Some hostages found God, most marines taunted their kidnappers and one CIA agent in solitary confinement kept his mind sharp with intricate fantasies of flying solo and teaching a university course.Four hundred Iranians were involved in the hostage-taking, but few make it on to the page here and those who do are usually seen through American eyes.
The kidnap, besides giving Gazans bombings and power cuts, has undermined the Hamas government, which seems to have little if any control over the kidnappers, even though some are from the Qassam brigades.
Several times during Mr Vagni's captivity, officials said Indonesians known to be members of Jemaah Islamiya were spotted among the kidnappers.
His family denies that it paid the kidnappers a ransom.
