A 37-year-old man from Ellesmere Port has been found guilty of kidnapping, false imprisonment and blackmail at Caernarfon Crown Court.

Nathan Parry, of Jack’s Wood, had denied the offences against the victim, a 33-year-old man living in the Oswestry-Welshpool area.

A jury took eight hours and 12 minutes to convict him by a ten-to-two majority and he was remanded in custody.

Natalie Goode, 33, of Willow Road, in Lache, Chester, was cleared of kidnapping and false imprisonment but convicted of blackmail. She was bailed for a pre-sentence report.

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Both will be sentenced later with two other men who admitted their roles in the events last September.

The court heard how bogus police in a stolen car pulled up on the driveway of the victim’s mid Wales home.

The victim had been handcuffed, driven off and blindfolded in the Audi, which had been taken a few months earlier from outside a house at Hawarden.

Giving evidence the victim’s mother told how she’d received a panic stricken mobile phone call from her son at midnight telling her to take cash from her safe and hand it to someone who would be calling.

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She took £5,000 from her own business and £6,000 belonging to her son and handed it in a plastic bag when a man ‘with a strong Scouse accent’ and woman turned up outside her home. When her husband inquired about their son the man replied: “He’ll be all right - don’t come near me.”

Later her husband took a call from their son and when they got to him he was in a terrible state, suffering pain because the handcuffs he had been placed in would not come off. It was at this point they called police.

The victim had denied his ordeal was “part of some kind of turf war between different drugs gangs”.

Prosecutor John Philpotts told the jury they might think the events of September 2 ‘sound rather like the plot of a television police drama’ but said the case involved ‘real people and real fear’.

The victim had, the court heard, been warned that his kidnappers wanted cash or he would be killed with a heroin injection. He had also been threatened with being shot in a warehouse at Birkenhead and was told his movements had been tracked for the previous few months.

Judge Philip Harris-Jenkins warned Goode ‘isn’t to read anything into the fact I am ordering a report’.

Parry had told the jury that he’d been a cannabis dealer while working as a car valeter for a Chester motor dealership.

He told his barrister he received a seven-year sentence for robbery in 2002 and one of nine years in 2006.

“Basically I didn’t have any morals, didn’t care,” Parry declared. “I have a bad record and wish I could go back and change my life.”