A group of criminals kept a pensioner detained against her will for more than three weeks in a bid to seize ownership of her apartment, the Interfax news agency reported Wednesday.
The 65-year-old woman was seized on June 27 from her apartment in the Primorsky district of St. Petersburg by a group of unknown captors, who drove her outside the city and imprisoned her at a dacha settlement, Interfax cited a police source as saying.
The woman was kept there for the next three weeks while her abductors tried to force her to sign over the title deeds of the apartment to them, the report said.
On Monday, one of the captors drove her to a social services office to remove from the deeds the name of her underage grandson, who was registered at the property. Under Russian law, anyone registered at a property has a legal right to live there.
However, police had been alerted to the woman's disappearance and when she appeared with her abductor at the social services office, the captor was detained, Interfax reported.
A kidnapping case has been opened, the report said.
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