A RUTHLESS torture gang including a woman (pictured right) forced their terrified ransom hostage to sit on a hot stove at gunpoint. The 20-year-old victim was held in the woman’s home in London’s East End while a �30,000 ransom was demanded from his friends and family

Chantelle Walterz from Hackney Wick and Kevin Boula from Bethnal Green, both 21 (top), and Perry Garcia (left, above) and Timothy Okuzuwa, both 22, from Hackney...

By Mike Brooke

A RUTHLESS torture gang including a woman (pictured above) forced their terrified ransom hostage to sit on a hot stove at gunpoint.

The 20-year-old victim was held in the woman’s home in London’s East End while a �30,000 ransom was demanded from his friends and family.

He was stripped, forced to sit on the cooker with a gun to his mouth, scalded with boiling water and beaten.

The gang made him call his brother and tell him they wanted the ransom.

“They’re going to put the hot kettle on me,” the terrified man told his brother. “They’re going to make me sit on the cooker.”

SHACKLES

He was later left in the bathroom after his ordeal—but managed to get free from his shackles and escape out of a tiny window of the house in Hackney Wick. Police found him wandering in the street.

Armed officers then burst into the premises in Well Street and arrested the woman who lived there, Chantelle Walterz, and an accomplice, Kevin Bouha, both 21.

The operation later led to arrests of another two men involved in the torture, convicted drug dealers Perry Garcia and Timothy Okunzuwa, both 22.

The gang were convicted at Southwark crown court on Friday, Bouha and Walterz for assisting false imprisonment, Garcia and Okunzuwa for conspiracy to blackmail and false imprisonment.

BOILING WATER

Judge Anthony Leonard went into graphic detail of the hours of torture the man went through.

“He had the barrel of a 9mm pistol put into his mouth and was told to bite down, then punched by all three men and told to strip,” said the judge.

“A kettle was boiled and water poured over his face and legs. The hob was switched on and he was told at gunpoint to sit on it.

“It was quite a horrific form of imprisonment and can only be described as torture.”

EXTORTION

The motive was to extort �30,000 from the hostage’s family to fund criminal activity, said Scotland Yard. Two of the kidnappers were involved in large-scale drug supply across Hackney and East London.

The judge handed three of them indeterminate sentences “for the protection of the public,” specifying minimum terms.

Bouha received a minimum three years. Garcia, who confessed to making �20,000-a-month selling drugs wholesale in East London, is serving a minimum five years, while his ruthless henchman Okunzuwa received a minimum five-and-a-half years. Walterz, whose house was used to imprison and torture the hostage, got four years.