Illegal Hostage Taking
Taking hostages is today considered a crime or an act of terrorism; the use of the word in this sense of abductee became current only in the 1970s. The criminal activity is known as kidnapping. An acute situation where hostages are kept in a building or a vehicle that has been taken over by armed terrorists or common criminals is often called a hostage crisis.
Hostage taking is still often politically motivated or intended to raise a ransom or to enforce an exchange against other hostages or even condemned convicts. However in some countries hostage taking for profit has become an "industry", ransom often being the only demand.
Read more about this topic: Hostage
Famous quotes containing the words illegal and/or hostage:
“No more astounding relic of the subjection of women survives in western civilization than the status of the prostitute.... In connection with what other illegal vice is the seller alone penalized, and not the buyer?”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)