Helicopters join hunt for kidnapped family

Press, 27 August 1979, Page 8

Helicopters join hunt for kidnapped family

NZPA-Reuter Nuoro (Sardinia) Helicopters swooped over the rugged hills surrounding Nuoro in Sardinia yesterday in an intensified police hunt for a kidnapped British businessman and his family. The police believe that the wealthy businessman, Rolf Schild, his wife, Daphne, and their teenage daughter, Annabelle, are being held somewhere in the wild countryside near NuOra. The family’s bumt-out car was found dumped in a ditch on Saturday just outside Nuoro, the heartland of Sardinia’s kidnap country. ' By early yesterday morning, five days since their disappearance, the Schild’s

two sons had not received a ransom demand. The Italian Interior Minister (Mr Virginio Rognoni) flew to Sardinia to co-ordi-nate the search for the Schilds and for five Italians abducted in Sardinia this summer. The local police in Nuoro. aided by reinforcements from the mainland, were not optimistic. “This is almost unexplored country and the local people observe the law of silence, of omerta,” one officer said. Caves and hundreds of isolated farm buildings provide perfect cover for the gangs, who are happy to wait' for months until their ransom demands are met.