Kidnapping | featured news

A 17-year veteran of the New York Police Department was suspended and four other men were arrested after a ransom phone call was traced to the detective’s home in Queens.

A man wanted by the FBI for killing a mother and daughter and kidnapping two other girls shot himself to death as officers closed in, but the two children were rescued without injuries and released from a hospital Friday....

Verna McClain told her fiance she had given birth to their child. But after she suffered a miscarriage, authorities said, she went looking for another baby to present to him. Now she's accused of killing a young mother to take one by force.

A 22-year-old woman in San Bernadino County, Calif., is being praised for using her cell phone to take pictures of a man who allegedly tried to snatch her off the street, then hiding inside a fast food restaurant after the man chased her, police say.

Police in Maine say someone broke two windows at the home where a toddler was reported missing seven weeks ago. Waterville police said Saturday that the girl's grandmother called police late Friday night to report that someone was throwing things at her home.

A missing 9-year-old girl escaped an apparent kidnapper and called 911 herself from a convenience store in Colorado Springs on Friday, police said. The Pueblo girl was reported missing Thursday night after she failed to return home from school. The car of the man she was with broke down Friday in Colorado Springs, and a passerby gave them a ride to a Circle K, police said.

Venezuelan police rescued Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos on Friday, two days after he was kidnapped, officials announced....

The government sent top investigators Thursday to hunt for Washington Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos, whose abduction has shaken Venezuela's elite athletes and focused attention on the nation's sharp rise in kidnappings for ransom....

Venezuelan federal authorities on Thursday dispatched their "best investigators" to track the kidnappers of Major League Baseball catcher Wilson Ramos, the country's justice minister said.

It seems as if violence is everywhere, but it's really on the run. Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.