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As he lay on the floor of a remote Welsh cottage, having been battered by a gang of masked kidnappers and handcuffed to a radiator pipe, musician and record producer Itay Kashti was heartbroken to imagine he would never see his family again.
“I thought: ‘This is it. I’m going to die and this is the end of my story.’ I felt it was the final scene from a movie. I was thinking about my children.”
He had a few moments to puzzle over why he was the victim in this story. He isn’t a very wealthy man and is not a high-profile figure. He wondered if it might be his roots in Israel. “I thought maybe I had been targeted for my background and somebody had decided to abduct an Israeli to make a point or gain something. But I really didn’t know.”
The bizarre and disturbing details of Kashti’s ordeal were laid bare at a sentencing hearing at Swansea crown court when his three attackers – Faiz Shah, 22, Mohammad Comrie, 22, and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20 – were imprisoned for eight years for kidnap.
Believing they could make a million-pound ransom, the trio lured Kashti from his London base to the rented cottage in Carmarthenshire. They beat him, threatened to kill him and secured him to the pipe, but Kashti managed to wriggle free and call for help.
Judge Catherine Richards, who sentenced the men, from West Yorkshire and south London, ruled they had twin motives. They had targeted an “innocent” and “hard-working” man for his perceived wealth but there may also have been a political angle and he had been picked on because of his “Jewish heritage”. The judge said, as the three plotted the kidnap, they persuaded themselves that Kashti was “less worthy” of their respect and compassion.
Kashti, 45, who immigrated to the UK from Israel in 2007, said: “I was stigmatised and dehumanised. The assumption was that a rich Jew lives in London, works in music, he must have money.”
Speaking to the Guardian in his studio in north London surrounded by guitars and amplifiers, Kashti spoke carefully and quietly: “I live a peaceful life and I’m not a political person. There was no reason to go for a person like myself.”
Nine months on, he is still trying to recover his sense of security. He cycles or takes the tube to his studio from his east London home but he is not completely at ease.
“We all have a safety bubble. And that safety bubble has been burst for me. I’m more conscious of trouble that could emerge, danger that could happen, unpredictable scenarios that could pop out. When new people reach out, I have to be a bit more vigilant. I guess it’s going to take me some time until I feel fully settled.”
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The ordeal began last summer when he received an email from someone claiming to be from a major record company, inviting him to a song-writing camp in Wales. “It sounded nice, I showed this to my wife, she said it looked cool.
“They sounded a little bit green but they didn’t sound suspicious in any way, especially if you’re not in a paranoid state of mind. The arrangement was that they would send a car to pick me up. They did mention that I didn’t have to bring anything but I took my Martin acoustic [a beloved guitar].”
When he walked into the cottage, he sensed “something eerie, not quite right. As I stepped in towards one of the bedrooms, three guys, all masked, jumped at me and started hitting and kicking me on the head,” he said.
“They said they were going to kill me and they chained me, handcuffed me to a pipe that came out of the radiator. I was bleeding, shocked.”
Then, suddenly, there was silence. Kashti later found out that the kidnappers had panicked and fled. He managed to unhook himself from the pipe, grabbed his phone and his guitar. He pointed to the blood stains still visible on the guitar case. “I didn’t want to leave the guitar. I dragged it along.”
Outside, he phoned his wife and police. “I was hiding behind some bushes. The police were there fairly quickly, in about 15 to 20 minutes.”
Kashti said his eyes were so badly bruised and swollen that he looked like Sylvester Stallone’s boxer character, Rocky Balboa, after a brutal fight. “The left eye was completely swollen. It was closed.” He said doctors in Wales and at the Moorfields Eye hospital in north London did an excellent job to help his physical rehabilitation.
His emotional recovery has taken longer. “It took me a few weeks to land back to reality. Most people didn’t know about what I’d been through and that separated me from everyone. You can’t just break it in a conversation and move on. It’s going to take a lot of time, and I don’t know what’s waiting for me, but I’m trying not to dwell.”
Kashti has appeared in a couple of videos as a musician, one about the legal system in Israel and another expressing solidarity with Israeli hostages taken during Hamas’s 2023 attack on Israel. But he said there was nothing that should have made him a target.
He said he was not angry with the attackers. “I hope that the jail experience will turn them into better people. If they do turn into better people, then it was worth locking them up.”
