crime

Late last summer, the composer and producer Itay Kashti received an email invitation to a songwriting camp that Polydor Records was running in rural Wales. Kashti, a 44-year-old London-based Israeli who mostly produces recordings for singer-songwriters and makes soundtrack music, has participated in a few such events over the years, and this one sounded worthwhile. “I scheduled a call with them,” he remembers, sitting in his basement studio in Kilburn, London, facing a computer screen and a recording console. But what at first seemed like a promising opportunity soon turned almost deadly.
The call Kashti scheduled wasn’t much to remember. The guy on the other end of the phone had a strong British accent, Kashti recalls, and he told him that his music had come to Polydor’s attention when a executive liked one of his tracks in an Amazon Prime movie. He agreed to go to Wales for about a week, starting Aug. 26. On a second call, days later, the same man told him that instruments and studio equipment would be provided, asked him if he had any dietary issues, and set up a car service to take him to a cottage in Carmarthenshire, a rural area of Wales north of Swansea.

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At 10 a.m. on Aug. 26, Kashti, who has lived in London for almost two decades, walked out of his apartment building and found his car — a white Mercedes driven by a man with short hair and a long beard. “After a couple of miles, he started asking me where I’m from and I was a bit taken aback,” Kashti remembers. They had more than four hours of driving ahead, and Kashti worried that, with antisemitism in the UK flaring during the Israel-Gaza conflict, talking about his heritage could make for an awkward ride. But the driver, who said he was a Muslim, told Kashti that he assumed he was from Israel based on his name and “he reassured me that if it bothered him, he wouldn’t have picked me up,” Kashti remembers. Born in the UK, with roots in Pakistan, the driver was curious about Israel, Kashti says, “and we had a really interesting conversation.”

It took some time to find the right location in Wales, a cottage in a remote field of small houses. Kashti remembers thinking that was odd — wouldn’t the organizers want the creators to stay together? — but he just assumed they would work together in another building. Kashti asked the driver to help him with his luggage, while he made sure they were in the right place. There wasn’t much around. The two of them walked into the cottage — Kashti first, the driver behind him — and “there was an alarming sense that something here is strange.”

Suddenly, three men with masks jumped him and he hit the floor. One punched the driver, who ran out as the men pummeled Kashti. He realized he had walked into a trap. “I saw it in slow-motion and I thought, ‘This is the last scene in the movie,’” he says. “After everything I’ve done — moving to the UK, getting into the music business, getting married — what a sorry ending.”

Kashti tried to run, but the three men threatened to kill him, then handcuffed his wrists together around a radiator pipe and ran out of the cottage themselves. Kashti realized that they hadn’t expected the driver. Then he figured out he could free himself, since the other end of the radiator pipe wasn’t connected to the wall. With his wrists still cuffed together, he grabbed his phone in one hand — the men had left it on a table after emptying his pockets — and the case that held his acoustic guitar in the other.

Wait: The guitar?

‘It’s a Martin!” Kashti says, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “It’s not very common, this model — they only made it from ’97 to ’99!” He opens a closet to show me the case, still smeared with some of his blood. The assault, which turned out to be part of an attempted kidnapping, only became public months later, after a March 14 sentencing hearing, so Kashti has had a few months to recover, reflect and regain at least some of his sense of humor.

At the time, with phone and guitar case in hand, he ran outside and tried to flag down the first car he saw, but “I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of Rocky,” he remembers, with one eye swollen shut, the other partly closed, and blood all over his face. The driver didn’t stop. So Kashti ran behind a bush to hide and call his wife, who alerted police. Hers was one of three calls to authorities, including his driver and the driver of the car that didn’t stop.

The police took Kashti to the hospital — he was badly bruised but suffered no broken bones or lasting damage. By nightfall, after a helicopter search, police arrested the three men, who had planned to hold Kashti for ransom: Mohammad Comrie, 23, from Leeds; Faiz Shah, 23, from Bradford; and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, from Wallington, London.

Kashti doesn’t know why they targeted him individually, but a police investigation determined that the three men chose him because he was Jewish.

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Under UK law, media coverage of a criminal case can offer the defendants grounds for appeal, so Kashti couldn’t talk about his experience while the investigation in Wales moved forward. “The first month, I was in shock,” he says. He couldn’t talk about his experience much, and no one could really understand what he went through. He worried that the three men might have been working with an accomplice. A trial was set for Feb. 17, with Kashti and his driver scheduled to testify on the second day. But Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime pled guilty, and a sentencing hearing took place on March 14.

Over the course of the investigation, police discovered that Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime had made an elaborate plan to kidnap Kashti and hold him for ransom. They bought handcuffs, a gag, a blindfold and masks, plus enough food and water to last for days. (They also tried to buy ketamine to use as a sedative, according to the prosecutor, without success.) They made some of these purchases with a stolen credit card, rented the cottage in Wales under a fake name and discussed how to launder the ransom money they hoped to get using cryptocurrency.

After all this effort, the three men failed to plan for the possibility that Kashti would enter the cottage with his driver — or even find a secure way to handcuff him. At the sentencing hearing, which resulted in eight-year terms for the three men — Comrie and Shah will go to prison, while Ogunnubi-Sime was sent to an institution for young offenders — Comrie’s lawyer said the plot had been “highly amateurish in its execution.”

The three men wanted to make money on a ransom. But Kashti had been targeted because of the kidnapers’ “understanding of his wealth and Jewish heritage,” according to Judge Catherine Richards’ statement at the sentencing. They “seemed to justify action against the victim in this case based on his background.” In a message in a group chat they shared, one of the men speculated that Kashti’s “fortune came from West Bank settlements taking Palestinian land.” Ogunnubi-Sime wrote that “all three of us have complete 100 percent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.”

Any attempted kidnapping would be frightening, but it’s alarming to think that a Jewish person was targeted for this crime in the UK in 2025. Some of the messages shared by Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime show a chilling disdain for Jews, and it’s scary, and a bit absurd, how wrong their stereotypes were. As a working producer, Kashti says he makes a middle-class living in the music business, but if he’s wealthy, he hides it well. “I had to sell the Bentley to afford this amazing look,” he jokes, glancing down at a black shirt, gray trousers and Nikes. His recent involvement in Israeli advocacy amounts to playing guitar at a memorial vigil for the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and he grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv and never spent much time in the West Bank.

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Kashti’s harrowing experience is an especially extreme example of how vulnerable working creators and musicians can be. Almost all of them work for themselves, and collaborating often involves traveling to an unfamiliar place to work with people one doesn’t know — sometimes for days on end. Only the most successful have a management staff or assistant to screen opportunities and potential collaborators. They are on their own.

Before this happened to Kashti, of course, it was hard to imagine that anyone would set up a fake songwriting camp solely to lure someone to a remote location — let alone target someone based on his ethnicity. “This didn’t spark any suspicions,” Kashti says. Why would it? These days invitations come from consultants as well as companies, and phone calls like the ones Kashti was on are often made by external organizers or assistants.

The truth is, Kashti was lucky. “One of the most chilling things is, my life was saved by such random things,” Kashti says. Most important was the intervention of his driver, who helped with his bags, walked into the cottage with them and happened to be fairly big and pretty quick. But that wasn’t just luck, and Kashti takes another lesson from his ordeal. If he hadn’t talked to his driver, he might not have asked him for help with his bags, and the driver might not have agreed. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most positive part of the story,” he says. “I connected with him on a human basis and that is what saved me.”