Here's a news story from the AP, on an American citizen kidnapped and possibly killed in Honduras. This is almost certainly the fellow who used to own Serenity in Placencia. It sure sounds like him, a retired cop from Connecticut, though I don't think he ever owned a casino, and I was told he had moved to Honduras. If so, I'm very sorry about this turn of events, which sadly is so typical of Honduras these days.

--Lan Sluder
Belize First magazine http://www.belizefirst.com/

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TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) - A retired American police officer was kidnapped and possibly killed in northern Honduras, a U.S. Embassy official said Monday.

Thomas Franklin Giblin, 64, was pulled from his unfinished, beach-front home outside Puerto Cortes on the Caribbean coast Saturday night, said embassy spokesman Carols Bakota.

Giblin's Honduran girlfriend, 24-year-old Leticia Lopez, was also briefly kidnapped, but escaped. She later told authorities that four men with machine guns were holding Giblin and demanding a $50,000 ransom.

But Bakota said police have recovered ``a significant amount of evidence'' suggesting that Giblin's kidnappers probably killed him just moments after his abduction.

A former officer with the Connecticut State Police, Giblin had lived in Belize for the last 12 years and owned a casino and several large homes there. He moved to Honduras in February.

Bakota said police in the city of San Pedro Sula, about an hour by car from Puerto Cortes, were planning to arrest four men late Monday night on charges they kidnapped and killed Giblin.

``We have notified family members that this is a homicide, not a kidnapping,'' Bakota said.

Police were also questioning Lopez.

Last month, William Patrick Donahue, a 49-year-old Miami native, was fatally shot on a Honduran highway.

Bakota said that attack brought to 13 the number of Americans killed in unsolved cases in Honduras since 1997.

``We are pleased that these arrests are being made so quickly in what would have been case number 14,'' he said. ``But the embassy has been putting a lot of pressure on Honduran authorities and that probably had a lot to do with it.''


Lan Sluder/Belize First
http://www.belizefirst.com