Prosecutor mulls death penalty in US kidnap

CLEVELAND - Agence France-Presse

A man takes part in a gathering outside a community meeting at Immanuel Lutheran Church held to talk about the kidnapping of Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry by neighbour resident Ariel Castro, in Cleveland, May 9, 2013 in Cleveland, Ohio. AFP photo

A U.S. prosecutor said May 9 he would seek to press charges that carry the death penalty against a man accused of kidnapping three Ohio women, raping them and forcibly ending their pregnancies.

Ariel Castro, a 52-year-old unemployed bus driver, has already been charged with kidnapping and raping the women over the course of a decade in his home in Cleveland. He was ordered held on an $8 million bond. But Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty said investigators would also go back over the many torments Castro allegedly inflicted on the women during their long ordeal, with the aim of bringing even more serious charges.

Aggravated murder

“I fully intend to seek charges for each and every act of sexual violence, rape, each day of kidnapping, every felonious assault, all his attempted murders and each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies” for which he himself was responsible, McGinty said. McGinty warned that Ohio imposes the death penalty in cases of aggravated murder in the course of a kidnapping and said his office was “in a formal process in which we evaluate to seek charges eligible for the death penalty.”