Gang who kidnapped man then cut off his little finger when his family could not pay £60,000 ransom are jailed for total of 152 years

Source: A gang of kidnappers who held a man hostage and cut off his little finger when his family could not pay the £60,000 ransom were jailed for a total of 152 years. Mr Lowe was kidnapped from a street near his home on the afternoon of September 30 2014.

Victim Damien Lowe was abducted on a street in Coventry at gunpoint and bundled into a van where a group of ten masked men kept him without food or water for 31 hours.

When his family initially failed to pay the money his kidnappers demanded, the gang chopped off his finger and left it under a brick on a garden wall for his panicked relatives to find.

Mr Lowe, said: 'The moment they pulled up next to me in their van in balaclavas and bundled me into the back was the most terrifying experience of my life

.

'The van was going all over the place I didn't have a chance to try and think where I was.

'When they took my phone and got me to find my brother's number I didn't know what they were going to do.

'I thought I was going to die there and then. When they told me I had to ask for £60,000 ransom I was almost relieved.

'But I knew there was no way my family would be able to pay and I thought I'd never see them again.

My kidnappers kept disappearing and then coming back, always to beat me, harder and harder. 

When they came in and covered my face I knew something bad was going to happen.

'That was when they cut my finger off. 

Abductors: (L-R) Lamar Grant, 26 , sentenced to 16 years, Ricardo Grant, 24, sentenced to 15 years and Jermaine Campbell, 24, sentenced to 15 years

Jailed: Yusuf Akbar, 33, sentenced to 12 years, Ismaeel Akbar, 32, sentenced to 14 and a half years, and Lewis Poyser, 24, sentenced to 18 years

His kidnappers kept him bound and gagged in the van, which was parked in a lock-up garage, and beat him with a metal bar before severing his finger.

According to the Birmingham Mail, the gang had threatened to cut off another digit for every hour they didn't receive payment.

Mr Lowe's family scraped together £20,000 to pay the kidnappers, and the 26-year-old was later thrown out of the vehicle on a a suburban street, before being found and rushed to hospital.

Working with intelligence gathered from West Midlands Police’s Serious Organised Crime Unit (SOCU), officers then stormed a house where the kidnappers were staying, and recovered the £20,000.