Held for 2 Years, Italian Kidnap Victim Escapes

A 20-year-old man who spent two years in the hands of kidnapers returned home Wednesday to a grateful mother and a cheering crowd of neighbors.

Hundreds of honking cars jammed the streets of Pavia, 20 miles south of Milan, where Ceasare Casella was reunited with his parents, ending one of Italy’s longest and most dramatic kidnapings for ransom.

Casella escaped Tuesday when his kidnapers, apparently panicked when they learned that police patrols were nearby, left him chained to a pole at a mountain stream near a southern village.

National police and paratroopers found Casella around 10 p.m. Tuesday after he knocked on the door of a cottage outside the Aspromonte village of Careri to seek help.

Casella told police he managed to uproot the pole he had been chained to and escape with the chains still around his neck and wrists.

Police brought Casella to Pavia early Wednesday morning in a motorcade after he was flown from southern Italy to Milan aboard an air force DC-9.

He was hugged and kissed by his mother, Angela, who last June provoked a national outcry when she spent 10 days touring the villages of the bandit-ridden Aspromonte region, on the toe of Italy, demanding the release of her son.

The bandits seized Casella outside his home in Pavia on Jan. 18, 1988, and took him to a hide-out in the Aspromonte area. His father, auto salesman Luigi Casella, had paid $800,000 to the bandits on Aug. 15, 1988. But the kidnapers then demanded $4 million more.