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The role of religion in kidnap case

[additional-authors]
August 28, 2009

Talk about an unbelievable story:

A woman who was kidnapped as an 11-year-old in 1991 was reunited with her family on Thursday after the police here arrested two suspects in the case and discovered a hidden compound where she had apparently been kept for nearly two decades.

This is such an unbelievable development that I was planning on blogging about it even though I suspected it had any religious angle. But then I read down in the New York Times story and, sadly, I found this:

The break in the case came Tuesday afternoon when a University of California, Berkeley, police officer noticed Mr. Garrido trying to hand out religious literature on campus and asked him for identification. A check of police databases revealed that Mr. Garrido, 58, was on parole.

Passing out religious literature on campus … Whaaaaat?!

More on this later at GetReligion.

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