None of them believed that Marc had said too much, which was indeed confirmed later. It seemed more likely that the Beatles had disposed of a prisoner for whom they knew they couldn’t get any money.

On his twenty-fifth birthday Daniel made a makeshift roulade for his fellow prisoners out of bread and jam, which he rolled together. He cut it into seventeen equal slices, which he shared around the cell. The others wished him a happy birthday and Pierre and James gave him an extra-long hug.

The Beatles also thought his birthday should be celebrated.

‘We have a present for you from your parents,’ said Ringo, going over to Daniel, who was sitting with his head facing the wall. A searing pain rose from the pit of his stomach as Ringo slammed his boot into Daniel’s ribs.

‘Your parents think this is some kind of gymnastics camp you’re at, so they’ve asked us to wish you a happy birthday!’ he shouted.

Twenty-five birthday kicks ensued, with short intervals between each one.

Daniel swallowed his screams as he shifted about to protect himself from the blows.

When his hands instinctively moved to protect his torso, Ringo shouted at him to lift his hands up again.

Some hours later something bulged out from Daniel’s ribs that looked like a blue tennis ball.

· * ·

Late at night on 11 March Anita’s mobile rang. Susanne and Kjeld sounded extremely upset at the other end. They had just received an email with an attachment.

‘It’s a dead man’s face,’ said Kjeld.

The man lay with his head in the desert sand and blood in his beard; it looked as if he had been shot in his right eye. They didn’t know who the man was, but the kidnappers wrote that he had ‘shared a cold cell with your son’.

DO NOT WASTE OUR TIME with useless messages that will not benefit you or your son the slightest way! You mention nothing about our 2,000,000 EURO demand and yet you’re asking about written messages/videos and sending birthday wishes!! You are digging your son’s shallow grave with your STUPIDITY!

They also mentioned Marc’s email address, together with a warning that Daniel could come home in a body bag, because ‘our lions are hungry to let Danish blood flow in revenge for the Mohammed cartoons’.

Kjeld tried to reassure himself with the thought that so many people were killed in Syria that it could be a picture of anyone. But he still stayed home from work the next day and Susanne agreed to give Arthur her password so that in the future the family wouldn’t open any attachments before Arthur had checked them.

Anita drove to Hedegård the next morning to kick off the fundraising.

It was time for the family to make a higher ransom offer.

The Experiment

The dining table in the living room in Hedegård was littered with small notes with names, phone numbers and email addresses of people in Daniel’s and the family’s networks. Kjeld and Susanne noted down all the contacts that they could possibly think of.

Anita sat at the computer, editing the draft of a letter that Arthur had sent her. She had experience from her job with seeking funding for environmental projects and, even though this was something quite different, she knew a lot about raising money.

The letter was to be sent to wider, but still controlled, circles of people they knew and trusted, for example, via the Listserv at Vesterlund School and the gymnastics clubs. It was crucial that the wording struck the right tone and that she didn’t reveal too much, and she hoped that those who knew Daniel would be willing to help.

‘This request is about a human life in danger,’ began the letter.

After this, there was information about why Daniel had travelled to Syria and why the case was very sensitive:

The papers you are holding are marked ‘confidential’, which doesn’t restrict you in a legal sense, but we hope that you will treat this request confidentially as, in a worst-case scenario, it could cost Daniel his life if the information is made public.

If recipients wished to offer their support, they should go through the family’s lawyer, Oluf Engell, from the law firm Bruun & Hjejle, which was helping to manage the account where donors could anonymously deposit an amount.

There is a professional and competent team behind this fundraising and everything is being done properly and in accordance with all laws and regulations. The money goes into a trust account that only the lawyer can manage. We as a family and the public will never know who has contributed to the cause.

According to the Danish Penal Code, section 114b, it is an offence to give, collect or otherwise disseminate money to terrorist organizations. This law was passed in order to prevent people in Denmark from helping to finance terrorism. Denmark hadn’t yet put ISIS on its list of terrorist organizations, even though judicially it would take only a couple of videos of some of ISIS’s crimes to prove the claim.

But neither in the law nor the extensive background material of the Act was there any reference to whether the law applied to paying ransoms for hostages held by terrorist organizations. Since no Danish court had yet dealt with such a case and thereby settled the question, it was unclear whether it was legal or illegal. A ransom payment still ends up in the terrorists’ pockets. At the same time, it could be argued that the aim of collecting money for a ransom was not to finance terrorism, but to save a human life.

Because the family’s fundraising was operating in a legal grey area, it was carried out under the supervision of the relevant Danish authorities to ensure that neither the contributors nor the family would be prosecuted for giving money to terrorists.

Even though ISIS would receive the ransom, for Anita and the rest of the family it was purely a matter of getting Daniel home alive. Anita’s boyfriend had been a soldier and he thought that paying a ransom to ISIS was highly problematic, but they had no choice if they wanted to get Daniel released. Anita was aware of the dilemma when she asked people for a contribution and could easily understand if they didn’t want to donate.

The motto for the fundraising was ‘many small streams make a big river’. In addition to people from associations and schools in the gymnastics world who knew Daniel, the letter was sent to friends and acquaintances in the local community. The whole family helped. Daniel’s paternal grandmother wrote the account number on the bulletin board where she went to choir and told her friends about the situation, while Daniel’s maternal grandfather collected contributions from neighbours and friends in the retirement home where he lived.

Although the family had reached out to only a relatively small number of recipients, they had just sent off the letter when representatives from the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) rang the doorbell in Hedegård.

Susanne welcomed the visitors, turned on the coffee machine and asked the PET agents to sit in the living room, so they could talk about the case over a cup of coffee. Anita was in the office receiving constant phone calls. The line to Hedegård was ringing off the hook at the same time as the agents from PET were expressing their concern about the fundraiser. They felt it was almost impossible to ensure that the news of Daniel’s capture wasn’t shared on social media and made public.

In a break between phone calls, Anita recognized that the fundraiser was an experiment and that she couldn’t control whether or not someone might write about Daniel on Facebook.

‘We have a choice between the plague and cholera and we have chosen cholera, because we simply can’t live with the plague,’ explained Anita.

A short time afterwards, the fundraiser was out of their control. The magazine The Gymnast sent out an email about Daniel to everyone who received the magazine’s newsletter. Anita almost had a heart attack. But donations poured in and no one said a word about Daniel on Facebook.