The Italian police had mentioned on Wednesday that they had prevented a nightmare plot. The police had arrested a man who deliberately wanted his ex-girlfriend disfigured with acid and crippled by a dark web hitman.
The Roman police believe the hitman-for-hire plan could be based on a “contemporary thriller movie”. They are said to have managed to thwart hiring a dark web hitman based on the online gender violence crime for the first time.
The suspect is a quadragenarian IT expert and working for a giant corporation. He had been placed under house arrest and charged with an attempt to grievous bodily harm backed by stalking.
The suspect had planned the assault “down to the last details” where he wanted to make his former girlfriend crippled and wheelchair-bound. The police had unveiled in a statement that the suspect had also agreed to pay the dark web hitman a “considerable sum of Bitcoin”.
Interestingly, the suspect had already conducted a down payment, and the dark web hitman was going to act upon his orders soon. Italian news agency AGI had quoted in a court document that the hitman-for-hire was supposed to receive Bitcoin (BTC) worth almost 10,000 euros or $11,900.
The police had revealed that they commenced the investigation back in February following an alert from Interpol by colleagues from another European country. The colleagues had first detected the suspicious dark web conversations on a darknet website, “Internet Assassins”. Europol had supported the Italian Postal Communication Police (Polizia Postale e delle Comunicazioni) in the investigation.
Europol had conducted a complex crypto-analysis on an urgent basis, enabling the provider’s tracing and identification that allows the suspects to purchase the cryptocurrencies. Following this, the Italian police had reached out to the cryptocurrency service provider. The provider had confirmed the Bitcoin transaction and further details about the suspect in the investigation.
The police had confirmed that the accused had not accepted his former girlfriend’s decision to discontinue their relationship and had lasted from November 2018 to July 2020. The accused had also bombarded her with messages trying to meet up and get back together.
“The man had sought an Italian killer willing to break his ex-girlfriend’s back so as to leave her paralyzed from the waist down and forced to get around in a wheelchair, as well as throwing acid on her face,” said the arrest warrant.
European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) of Europol and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT) hosted at Europol had supported this investigation with operational expertise and analysis.
Several appalling cases of women violence had been registered in Italy in the past couple of years. This includes the murders committed by men and acid attacks targeting their former partners or the current ones.
A statistics of the same reveals out of 111 women murdered in the year 2019, 55 had been assassinated by their currency boyfriend or husband. 13 of them had been killed by their ex. This information had been furnished by Istat, the national statistic institute, in their most recent data regarding the topic.
Source: Europol
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