No one wants to take delivery of a ransom note and it was no different for a Mrs Li in Sichuan last week. This being modern China, it was sent via WeChat. At 11pm she received the threatening message alongside a photo of her husband tied to a tree, reports Western China Metropolis Daily.
The kidnappers were demanding Rmb20,000 ($2,956) for the man’s safe release. The panicked wife immediately called the police for assistance but when detective Shao Zhifei turned up at the scene he soon started making a few Poirot-like deductions. He found the photo particularly odd: neither the husband’s hands nor feet were tied, and his facial expression seemed unusually calm.
Shao then got his colleagues in the traffic police to check roadside cameras and they discovered that at the time the photo was sent, the husband was still driving around Guangan, a county level city in Sichuan. They soon tracked him down to a petrol station, where he was picked up and taken to the police station for questioning.
Under interrogation he admitted that earlier in the day he had the idea of testing whether his wife still cared for him and so staged his own kidnapping to see how quickly she offered to pay the ransom. The local public security bureau frowned on this waste of police time and as punishment he was detained for 10 days.
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