Physical Address
Indirizzo: Via Mario Greco 60, Buttigliera Alta, 10090, Torino, Italy
The victim in 1996 and 2024
A 45-year-old man, missing for 28 years, was found kidnapped in his neighbor’s home, in the commune of El Guedid in the wilaya of Djelfa (300km south-east of Algiers), the prosecutor’s office announced on Tuesday. wilaya authorities announced this Tuesday, May 14. The suspect, aged 61, continued to live as if nothing had happened.
Disappeared mysteriously without a trace in 1996 when he was 16 years old, the man was found in a neighbor’s house searched by the gendarmes following a denunciation published on social networks, indicated in a press release from the prosecutor near the El Idrissia court.
The young man, identified as Omar Benamrane, would have spent 28 years of confinement in his neighbor’s cattle enclosure, according to the same source.
Relatives claimed that during his captivity the man could see and hear his family members through an opening in the enclosure “but was unable to scream or flee due to a spell his captor had cast on him.” .
The prosecution specified that the suspect, a 61-year-old local municipal employee who was considered by village residents as an ordinary man with no history, was arrested and placed in detention.
Plunged into doubt, the family remembered that after the disappearance of their child, the victim’s dog, which probably smelled of its master, did not leave the threshold of the kidnapper’s house, before the dog also does not disappear.
Following a post published on Facebook reporting the victim’s presence at his neighbor’s house, the brother filed a complaint with the gendarmerie.
The missing man’s family began gathering evidence and eventually stormed the suspect’s house to find the victim in the middle of a room full of hay, and pulled him out. The National Gendarmerie then intervened and arrested the suspect. The victim was evacuated for medical examinations and to begin security procedures to complete the investigation already opened when Omar was a teenager.
This surreal story which created a buzz on social networks in Algeria has aroused suspicions from many Internet users who question the veracity of the facts.